Gorbachev: The rise and fall of the last Soviet leader

• MANSUR MIROVALEV

FORMER Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms put an end to the nuclear arms race and the Cold War, has died. He was 91.

Gorbachev, nicknamed ‘Gorby’, was in many ways a nemesis to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who built the Iron Curtain, turned most of Eastern Europe into a bloc of Moscow’s satellites and challenged Washington’s political supremacy in a Manichean confrontation that put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, reversed the course laid down by Stalin and his successors in a series of somewhat idealistic and incoherent steps he called “perestroika” and “glasnost” — reconstruction and openness.

However, he saw his work as a return to the principles of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and an attempt to rebuild the failing command economy and humanise the rigorous communist doctrine.

“In a word, freedom came to the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), to Russia,” he said in a 2011 television show dedicated to the 25th anniversary of perestroika, adding that “in theory and in practice, we tried to get back to Lenin’s legacy”.

In the late 1980s, he stood as a political colossus, but his feet turned out to be made of clay.

Perestroika fuelled centrifugal tendencies that broke apart what the Soviet anthem referred to as “the unbreakable union of free republics”.

The 1991 Soviet collapse was also actuated by record-low oil prices that could no longer keep the Soviet economy afloat.

Even more lethal to Gorbachev’s domestic policies was a power play between him and his main rival, Boris Yeltsin, who declared Russia’s independence from the rest of the USSR, although nine Soviet republics, including Russia, voted to stay together in a 1991 referendum.

Gorbachev’s good intentions paved the way for a string of inter-ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union and plunged Russia and the 14 newly independent ex-Soviet republics into a decade of painful economic transition and political upheavals.

After almost 10 years of Yeltsin rule marked by the first Chechen war, Russians started to associate democracy with nothing but chaos.

Under president Vladimir Putin, Russia started to drift to bellicose, neo-conservative nationalism, while pro-Western “colour revolutions” in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Ukraine installed single-term presidents or resulted in Russian invasions.

For the most part, Gorbachev’s losses became the West’s gains.

“Central and Eastern Europe do not see an alternative to the present in its past,” political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov said in a 2014 opinion piece published in the Gazeta.ru daily. “In the former USSR there is no such feeling. In some places the situation is so dire that the Soviet past seems like a golden age, and a possible future does not promise anything.”

Gorbachev’s sporadic attempts to return to politics found no support even among his once most-ardent sympathisers.

A MODEST BACKGROUND

A famine caused by “collectivisation” decimated the southern Russian village of Privolnoye shortly after Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was born there on 2 March 1931, into a family of Russian and Ukrainian descent.

Both his grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned during the Great Purge of the 1930s, and their ordeals would later influence his decision to break the Communist Party’s political and ideological monopoly.

Gorbachev started operating a combine harvester at age 15, and his tireless work brought him a government award, a chance to study law at Moscow State University — and the little red ID card of a Communist Party member.

In the 1960s, Gorbachev quickly climbed the party ladder in his native Stavropol region while the Soviet Union enjoyed its superpower heyday and a brief cultural renaissance that would shape Russia’s intellectual history and Gorbachev’s mindset.

ASCENSION TO POWER

In 1971, Gorbachev became the youngest member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and in 1978, he moved to Moscow with his wife Raisa and daughter Irina.

After visiting several Western European countries, he was shocked to see the prosperity brought on by what Soviet propaganda called “the rotting capitalist system”.

Those were the years of domestic “stagnation” and the Cold War’s peak. Washington and Moscow conducted gigantic military drills and had a combined arsenal of some 40 000 nuclear warheads, according to a 1980 United Nations report.

But the arms race bled the Soviet economy dry, while dissent grew from within.

STOKING THE PERESTROIKA

At 54, Gorbachev was at the helm of the world’s third most populous country that boasted an army of five million troops and officers.

But Russia’s economy and agriculture sector were far from healthy. There were shortages of basic consumer goods such as toilet paper or women’s shoes, and the country that once was Europe’s breadbasket had to rely on grain exports from the United States and Canada.

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