Mikhail Gorbachev: Celebrated Abroad, Resented at Home

When Mikhail Gorbachev died in August 2022, the reaction split almost perfectly along a line drawn through the middle of the twentieth century. Western leaders praised him as a visionary who ended the Cold War and set half of Europe free. In Russia the official response was cool and clipped, and among many ordinary Russians it turned into something close to contempt. The same man, the same life, and two verdicts that barely seem to describe the same person.

What makes the split so striking is that it does not rest on any argument about the facts. Nobody seriously disputes what Gorbachev did. The argument is about what those deeds were worth, and the answer depends on where a person was standing when the Soviet Union came apart. A man who set out to save a superpower ended up presiding over its disappearance, and that one outcome can look like triumph from one window and disaster from the next.

Who he was

Gorbachev was born in 1931 in Privolnoye, a farming village in southern Russia, into a peasant family that lived through the famines and terror of the Stalin years up close. Two of his grandfathers were arrested. He was clever, ambitious, and a genuine believer, and he rose steadily through the Communist Party until, in 1985, he became its General Secretary and so the leader of the Soviet Union.

He was 54, strikingly young next to the grey, ailing men who had run the country before him. His three immediate predecessors had died in office in less than three years, and the Politburo, the party's ruling committee, seemed to be governing from a hospital ward. Gorbachev inherited a system that was quietly rotting: an economy stagnant for a decade, a military budget it could no longer afford, a demoralising war in Afghanistan, and a population that had stopped believing the official promises long ago. He did not mean to bury that system. He meant to wake it up.

What he actually set out to do

This is the part most often misunderstood. Gorbachev did not come to power to end communism or to break up the Soviet Union. He came to save it. His goal was to turn a stiff, fearful state into a lively, prosperous, humane socialist one, a system that could hold its own against the West without the gulag and the censor propping it up.

To do that he launched two reforms whose names slipped into every language on earth. Glasnost, meaning openness, relaxed censorship and let citizens, newspapers, and eventually television criticise the government in ways that had been literally unthinkable a few years before. Perestroika, meaning restructuring, tried to loosen the grip of central planning and let limited market forces and private business back into an economy that had banned them for sixty years.

The two were meant to work together. Openness would expose the corruption and waste that restructuring could then clear away, and an informed, engaged public would push a reluctant bureaucracy to change. The bet was that a more honest and more efficient socialism could not only survive but thrive. It was a bet on the system's underlying strength, and it turned out to be a bet on a house whose foundations had already gone.

The opening to the West

Abroad, Gorbachev did things no Soviet leader had dared. He pursued arms control as a real aim rather than a stalling tactic, signing the INF Treaty with US President Ronald Reagan in 1987 to scrap a whole category of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, weapons that had put every European capital minutes from destruction. He wound down the ruinous war in Afghanistan and pulled Soviet forces out by 1989.

Then came the decision that mattered most. When the peoples of Eastern Europe rose against their communist governments through 1989, Gorbachev chose not to send in the tanks. This was no small thing. Earlier Soviet leaders had crushed exactly these kinds of risings with force, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, on the principle that no country was ever allowed to leave the socialist camp. Gorbachev threw that principle out. He let the satellite states go.

That restraint let the Berlin Wall fall in November 1989 and the Eastern Bloc break away, country by country, largely without bloodshed, an astonishing outcome for the collapse of an empire. To the West it made him a liberator and a man of peace. Margaret Thatcher, no soft touch on communism, had already said he was a man the West could "do business with," and in 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Why it went wrong at home

The very reforms that made him a hero abroad were pulling the country apart under his feet. Openness and restructuring, let loose together, fed each other in ways Gorbachev never intended.

Perestroika took apart the levers of the old command economy faster than it could build the workings of a new one. Half-measures satisfied no one. Central planners lost their authority while markets were never allowed to work properly, and the result was the worst of both: empty shelves, falling output, hoarding, and real hardship for families who had at least been able to count on the old system's grim predictability. Glasnost did more than allow criticism of the government. It let out long-suppressed nationalist feeling across the Soviet Union's fifteen republics, from the Baltics to the Caucasus, and once people could say out loud that they wanted out, the Kremlin had no answer that did not involve the very force Gorbachev had given up.

By 1990 and 1991 he was caught in a vice. Hardliners in the party and the military raged that he was giving away the empire. Radical reformers, led by the blunt and popular Boris Yeltsin, complained that he was moving too slowly and clinging to a socialism whose time had passed. In August 1991 the hardliners made their move, mounting a coup and putting Gorbachev under house arrest at his holiday villa in Crimea. The coup collapsed within days, beaten on the streets of Moscow, but it was Yeltsin, standing on top of a tank outside the Russian parliament, who came out the hero, not the president they had tried to overthrow. Gorbachev returned to the capital with his authority shattered. Power was already draining away to Yeltsin and the leaders of the republics.

In December 1991 the Soviet Union was formally dissolved into fifteen independent countries. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigned as president of a state that had ceased to exist, and the red flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time.

Two verdicts from one set of facts

Line the facts up and it is easy to see why both views hold, and why neither side is simply lying.

Seen from the West, Gorbachev ended a decades-long nuclear standoff without firing a shot, let half of Europe choose its own path, and shrank the world's stock of the weapons that could have ended it. On that reading he is one of the most important peacemakers of the century, a man who had the power to drown change in blood and chose not to.

Seen from Russia, the same man presided over the loss of a superpower, the amputation of an empire built over three centuries, and the economic collapse of the 1990s that followed, years when savings vanished, life expectancy fell, and a proud country felt itself become an object of the West's pity. To many Russians he did not free anyone. He is the man who lost the country.

The clearest measure of that verdict at home came in 1996, when Gorbachev ran for president of Russia and won roughly half of one per cent of the vote, a humiliation almost without parallel for a former head of state. President Vladimir Putin, who has called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the century, speaks for a great deal of that resentment, and has spent his career trying to reverse the sense of national loss that Gorbachev's name still stirs up at home.

The communist who opened the door

There is an old question about Gorbachev: was he a communist who secretly preferred the capitalist way? The honest answer is more interesting than yes or no. Gorbachev stayed, to the end, a socialist who wanted to reform his system rather than replace it, and he said so consistently, even when it cost him allies on both sides. He did not dream of turning Moscow into a copy of New York.

And yet, by opening his country to the world, by easing the standoff with the capitalist West, and above all by refusing to hold the empire together through violence, he set in motion the end of the very system he was trying to rescue. Each humane choice loosened another bolt. In later life he called himself a social democrat and spoke with open admiration of Western Europe's mix of market economics and generous welfare, the model he seemed, in the end, to have wanted all along.

That is the paradox at the centre of him. A lifelong communist whose reforms opened a door, and the Soviet system, given the chance, walked through it and never came back.

The seat you watch from

Gorbachev did not intend most of what he is remembered for. He set out to fix the Soviet Union, and instead, by choosing again and again not to save it with force, he presided over its peaceful break-up. There is a case that this was the single most humane thing any leader did in the twentieth century, and a case that it was the great blunder of it. Both rest on exactly the same events.

Whether that makes him a hero or a failure turns almost entirely on one earlier question: whether the thing that ended was worth saving. If the Soviet Union was a prison, he unlocked it. If it was a home, he let it burn. The facts do not change. Only the seat you watch them from does, and that, more than anything Gorbachev himself ever did, is why the world could not agree on how to mourn him.

Sources

• Council on Foreign Relations, "Gorbachev: Conflicted Catalyst of Cold War's End".
• Smithsonian Magazine, "The Contradictory Legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev".
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Mikhail Gorbachev".
• Al Jazeera, "Mikhail Gorbachev: The rise and fall of the last Soviet leader".