Arthur Greene
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 – 2022)
In March this year, veteran journalist Alexey Venediktov told Forbes Russia that Mikhail
Gorbachev – the person more responsible than any other for ending the Cold War – was “upset”.
This is perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to knowing what the last ever leader of the Soviet Union thought about Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Gorbachev had brought peace between the USA and the Soviet Union in 1991, ending a period of hostility that (officially) began in 1947.
It was the Cold War, an ideological dogfight for global dominance that on more than one occasion brought us to the brink of global nuclear destruction.
It was the fight that pitted Joseph Stalin against Harry Truman, JFK against Nikita Khrushchev and Ronald Reagan against Leonid Brezhnev. None was able to end the tension, and few were able to even cool it.
Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985 at the age of 52. He died on Tuesday evening at the age of 91 at the end of a long illness, and in the year of his demise the East and the West once again turned on one another.
At home, Gorbachev was blamed for the fall of the Soviet Union. His policies of glasnost and perestroika – meaning “openness” and “reconstruction” – represented values never before seen in the 70-year history of the Soviet Union.
To be “open” was to allow freedom of the press, a right which he saw his distant successor Putin withdraw earlier this year. In the early 90s, people were able to criticise their government for the first time.
After decades of dominion over eatern European countries, Gorbachev allowed their peoples to rise up against their Communist rulers.
This, unfortunately for him, led to a nationalist backlash back home. In 1991, the country fell and he resigned as General Secretary.
According to Gorbachev himself, however, the downfall of the Soviet Union was determined five years earlier – by a technical fault at a nuclear power plant 800 km away in 1986.
On April 26, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. The disaster resulted in an ecological catastrophe and as many as 90,000 deaths in total from radiation poisoning. It was a disaster Gorbachev’s regime never recovered from.
After his time in office, he set up the Gorbachev Foundation, which focused on social and humanitarian projects. He also spent a great deal more time with his family; his wife Raisa Gorbacheva and his only child, Irina.
Raisa died in 1999. Mikhail Gorbachev is survived by his daughter Irina.
Image source: @ABC
