Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet leader who oversaw end of Cold War, dead at 91
Former USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev has reportedly died at the age of 91
He was number 287 on the list.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has reportedly
died at the age of 91 after a long health battle, according to Russian news
agencies.
The Tass, RIA Novosti and Interfax news agencies cited the
Central Clinical Hospital. Gorbachev's office said earlier that he was
undergoing treatment at the hospital after a serious and long illness. No
further details were given.
Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until
its collapse in December 1991. As general secretary and president, he helped
forge weapons reduction deals with the U.S. and other Western powers and remove
the Iron Curtain.
Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a
breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in
the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European
nations from Russian domination and the end of decades of East-West nuclear
confrontation.
His decline was humiliating. His power hopelessly sapped by
an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in
office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned
on Dec. 25, 1991. The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later.
A quarter-century after the collapse, Gorbachev told the
Associated Press that he had not considered using widespread force to try to
keep the USSR together because he feared chaos in a nuclear country.
"The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And
it would have immediately pushed the country into a civil war," he said.
Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in
ending the Cold War and spent his later years collecting accolades and awards
from all corners of the world. Yet he was widely despised at home.
Russians blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet
Union — a once-fearsome superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate
nations. His former allies deserted him and made him a scapegoat for the
country's troubles.
"Mikhail Gorbachev is as much respected in the West as
he is detested in Russia," former Defense Intelligence Agency officer
Rebekah Koffler told Fox News. "To Westerners, he brought openness and
rebuilding (glasnost and perestroika), and for the Russians, he destroyed the
USSR."
The official news agency Tass reported that Gorbachev will
be buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife, Raisa. He's
survived by his daughter, Irina, and two granddaughters.
t was not the objective he set himself when he was elected
general secretary of the Soviet Communist party in March 1985, nor did he
predict or plan the way the cold war would end, the haemorrhaging of the
Communist party, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe, the
reunification of Germany or the break-up of the Soviet Union itself.
What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders
was that he started a process of reform and did not try to reverse it once it
threatened to spin out of control. The great facilitator, he carried on, even
to the point of resigning with dignity as his power faded away.
In the aftermath of his downfall, as his successor Boris
Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the west to
sneer at Gorbachev as “just another communist at heart”. He was called a
failure because he had not been willing to liberalise state-controlled prices,
privatise industry and open the Soviet economy to outside forces as fast as the
emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s rightwing western advisers wanted. He was
ridiculed for trying to “reform” communism when he should have recognized that
it was dead.
The charges were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they
characterised Gorbachev as an ideologue when he was, in fact, one of the great
pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only part that was true was that he
tried to “reform” life for Russians. He sought to maintain some form of
democratic socialism, with a continuing role for government intervention and a
foundation of social justice. Compared with the crony capitalism and chaotic
collapse of public services that marked the first years of post-communism in
Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were a variety of avenues for
developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the
process should be done gradually was legitimate and honourable.
Gorbachev was not alone in failing to predict the demise of
the communist system. None of his contemporaries saw the situation any more
clearly than he did, nor did western politicians or analysts. As late as 1988 –
only three years before the end – Yeltsin was pleading with the Communist party
to “rehabilitate” him and give him another chance after he had resigned from
the politburo. Rightwing western politicians, among them Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher, later claimed that they had brought about the collapse by
“standing up to totalitarianism”. But the record suggests that the system
self-destructed.
Communism, in practice, was never a monolith. It was
constantly evolving. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin knocked away the last
props of consent and used terror as the central pillar of regime stability. But
in the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 to 1982, terror vanished. The
system’s stability still rested partly on repression, but also on its ability
to provide a secure material environment for the overwhelming majority and a
slowly improving standard of living. Much of it was paid for by the export of
plentiful oil and gas reserves, but it could have continued under Gorbachev for
another 10 or 20 years. There was no overriding urgency for the process of
perestroika (“restructuring” or “transformation”) that he set in train. The
system was not as efficient as it should have been, and Soviet citizens were
not as happy as the propaganda alleged. But nor were they on the verge of
revolt. Five years after the Soviet collapse, 40% of Russian voters were still
willing to support the Communist party candidate in the 1996 presidential
election.
The story of Gorbachev, in fact, is a fine example of the
occasional importance of the personal factor in human history. As general
secretary, he was one of the world’s most powerful men. He could have remained
in office for years had he not chosen the path of reform.
The son of Maria (nee Gopkalo) and Sergey Gorbachev, he was
born in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol region of southern Russia.
His paternal grandfather was chairman of the area’s first collective farm and
an early party member; his father was a tractor driver. Misha, as Mikhail was
known, was educated locally and helped out in the summer with the harvest. A
bright and ambitious boy, on leaving school he applied to enter the law faculty
of the prestigious Moscow State University. The five years he spent there from
1950 marked him out as something of an intellectual, although a contemporary
with whom he shared rooms, the Czech Zdenek Mlynar, remembered that a favourite
Gorbachev phrase came from Hegel: “Truth is always concrete.” He used the
expression to highlight the gap between what lecturers said about Soviet life
and the reality on the ground.
Stalin’s death occurred on 5 March 1953, halfway through
Gorbachev’s time at university. Although both his grandfathers had been
arrested in the 1930s – one of them was sent to a Siberian labour camp for
“sabotaging” socialism – Gorbachev reacted to the event like most of his
contemporaries; deeply moved, he spent all night queuing to see the dictator’s
body lying in state. The thaw that followed made his lecturers more open and
interesting, he wrote in his autobiography, but it was not enough to turn him off
an orthodox career pattern.
He had been active in the Komsomol, the Young Communist
League, while at university, and on graduation in 1955 he went back to Stavropol
to work in the local agitation and propaganda department. He moved into the
party proper, and made a rapid rise through its ranks. Within 15 years he was
first secretary of the Stavropol regional party organisation. In the top-down,
hierarchical structure it was a post akin to governor-general. Orders were
received from above and handed on below, without any serious or open discussion
of other options. The job gave the holder an almost automatic seat on the
party’s central committee, in theory the main policy-making organ. At 40,
Gorbachev was one of its youngest members.
Stavropol was a relatively rich and agriculturally efficient
area, and Gorbachev, as the top regional man, got to know his predecessors,
Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, by then close to the pinnacle of the Soviet
system. He also knew Fyodor Kulakov, the man in charge of Soviet agriculture,
who seemed destined for the top job, general secretary of the central
committee. But Kulakov died suddenly in 1978, and Gorbachev was given the
agriculture portfolio, a job that also gave him candidate membership in the
central committee’s inner cabinet, the politburo.
He was now close to the seat of power himself, and the
youngest member of an increasingly ageing team of men. He saw the semi-senile
Brezhnev, consumed by vanity and refusing to retire, take the fateful decision
with the veteran foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and the defence minister
Dmitri Ustinov to invade Afghanistan in 1979 without consulting the politburo.
Whatever he thought, Gorbachev was too good an official to oppose the decision.
The man he admired was Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev in 1982 and tried to
accelerate economic growth by raising the rate of investment and giving
enterprises limited permission to retain some of their profits.
Andropov also hoped to channel investment away from the
military-industrial complex by putting a cap on the arms race. But his health
collapsed and he died in 1984, after only 14 months in office. Gorbachev should
have been the obvious successor, but the politburo chose another ailing figure,
Konstantin Chernenko. The old guard thought Gorbachev was still too young.
When Chernenko died a year later, Gorbachev’s turn as
general secretary was almost inevitable.
His colleagues had no idea that he would set off a chain of
dramatic reforms. But nor did he. He did not come to power with a plan. He had
told some contemporaries, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he was to appoint
as foreign minister, that “things” could not continue as they were. What he was
referring to was the economy, where defence spending was growing faster than
any other sector.
At first, he continued on the Andropov path of controlled
reform, or uskorenye (acceleration). But there were two differences. Gorbachev
was aware that a swath of younger people in the middle ranks of the party’s
central apparatus in Moscow – as well as in the academic institutes – thought
like him. He could rely on their support. He decided to become more open about
the problems of Soviet society, travelling the country, admitting to
difficulties and listening to ordinary people complain. Uskorenye changed to
perestroika. The hope was that Soviet people, in return for the leadership’s
new honesty, would join a new social contract and work harder and more
efficiently.
The Gorbachev ideologues described it as the “human factor”,
an echo of the 1968 Prague Spring, when Czech and Slovak reformers tried to
introduce “socialism with a human face”. He also sought to win greater consent
by allowing writers and journalists to reopen many taboo issues. The blanks in
official Soviet history — such as the Stalinist purges and the full horror of
the Gulag — could be filled in. Contemporary problems, such as drunkenness,
prostitution, homelessness, crime and corruption, could be aired in the press.
Known as glasnost, this policy meant the end of censorship.
Unlike Andropov, Gorbachev also resolved to take unilateral
steps towards disarmament and accept the demands of western peace activists to
dismantle the new generation of medium-range Soviet rockets targeted on western
Europe, which had provoked a matching deployment of US Cruise missiles in
western Europe targeted on the Soviet Union. In 1986, this policy was put into
the context of a new international philosophy. Gorbachev and his close ally,
Alexander Yakovlev, argued that the world was interdependent, and that because
of the horror of nuclear annihilation, the “universal values of mankind”
outweighed any divisions on class lines.
This meant, in essence, that the clash between capitalism
and socialism was no longer the fundamental principle of Soviet policy. It also
suggested that the concept of nuclear deterrence on which the cold war was
based had lost its validity. It won Gorbachev massive support among ordinary
people in the west. Politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher were forced onto
the defensive. Also in 1986, just a year after coming to power, he signalled
that he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. A year later, in 1987, he was
saying that eastern European states were free to develop their own roads to
socialism.
US President Ronald Reagan, left, one of the western leaders
whom Mikhail Gorbachev forced on the defensive with his bold approach to
nuclear deterrence, 1985.
The weak part of perestroika was the failure of his economic
reforms and his refusal to tackle agriculture. In the field of consumer goods
and services, he went beyond Andropov in allowing individuals to start small
businesses, though these often fell foul of local bureaucrats who refused to
give them licences. Frustrated, he increasingly saw the problem as coming from
party officials resisting or sabotaging his reforms. He sacked a number of
lower-level officials and senior politburo members, though it took him three
years to understand that they were being replaced by equally obstructive clones.
This was what led to the second stage of the Gorbachev
reforms, as he decided that the system had to change, and not just the men who
ran it. “I must tell you frankly,” he told the Polish parliament in 1988, “in
the beginning, we did not understand the need, or rather the inevitability, of
reforming the political system. Our experience during the first stage of
perestroika brought us to it.”
The vehicle chosen was a new Soviet parliament, or Congress
of People’s Deputies. Gorbachev summoned a special party conference in June
1988 and persuaded it to accept the idea of a new elected chamber. He wanted
the government to be answerable to the new body rather than the party, thus
preventing the party from interfering in day-to-day government issues and confining
it to a strategic role. “You can’t have two bears in the same cave,” he
explained later. Two-thirds of the parliament’s members would be directly
elected in a competitive poll. Inevitably, this meant that candidates would be
free to campaign and that the old restrictions on freedom of assembly and
speech would have to be lifted.
Between January 1989 and the elections in March, Soviet
citizens suddenly found themselves free to heckle, debate, shout abuse and
criticise the party and government. This was the moment when Gorbachev’s
“revolution from above” turned into a “revolution from below”, as thousands
took to the streets. At least 30 senior party members failed to get elected.
The new congress, when it met in May, produced extraordinary debates. Numerous
independents and several anti-communists, such as the dissident physicist
Andrei Sakharov, were elected. For two weeks, people were glued to their
television sets, hearing unprecedented criticism of the old system. Among the
reformers, a key demand soon became the abolition of article six of the
constitution, which guaranteed the Communist party’s monopoly on power. Having
conceded the right of independents to be elected to the congress, it was hard
for Gorbachev to resist the idea of letting them form their own parties.
The 1989 congress was the turning point, after which
Gorbachev was no longer in control of events. Increasingly, too, he became
squeezed between those who wanted to move faster and those who resisted change.
His troubles grew worse when the newly elected deputies from the Baltic
republics, backed up by mass movements, started to call for economic autonomy
and political independence. In eastern Europe, similar movements were emerging,
starting in Poland with the old Solidarity trade union, which was relegalised
and won elections in June 1989.
Gorbachev reacted in amazingly relaxed fashion to the
changes in eastern Europe. None of his advisers had predicted that this would
be the result of their strategy of non-intervention. They had imagined that
reformers within each country’s Communist party would be the main beneficiaries
of change. But in eastern Europe the local parties had come overwhelmingly to
be seen as traitors to their nations, since they had gone along with Soviet
invasions in the 1950s and 60s. Thus, in the first flush of electoral
democracy, the communists did badly.
With hindsight, Gorbachev’s views can be seen as naive. His
merit was not to try to prevent the changes — even when they started to produce
a complete rout of the Soviet position when the Berlin wall came down in
November 1989. When Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany insisted on rapid
reunification and the absorption of what had been East Germany into Nato the
following year, Gorbachev acquiesced. By then, he was beset on so many fronts
that he had no chance to reconsider his policies. He was simply swept along by
events.
The same was true inside the Soviet Union, which he cared
about far more than the future of eastern Europe. He foolishly tried to resist
the Baltic states’ drive to independence, instead of seeing that if he accepted
they were a special case he might prevent the independence bug from spreading
to the other 12 Soviet republics. As a Russian nationalist, it seemed that he
could not understand the psychology of other nations. He was particularly
shocked when the overwhelming majority in Ukraine voted to leave the Soviet Union
in December 1991.
Just as the first three years of Gorbachev’s time as Soviet
leader illustrated the occasional importance of an individual in history, the
same was true of the last two years. Now, however, the key personality was
Yeltsin. Indeed, had it not been for this one man’s driving ambition, Gorbachev
might have saved the Soviet Union. But Yeltsin became his bete noire. In a
retrospective interview with me in 2011, Gorbachev regretted he had not got
Yeltsin out of the way before he became a direct rival: “I was probably too
liberal and democratic as regards Yeltsin. I should have sent him as ambassador
to Great Britain or maybe a former British colony,” he told me.
A contemporary, and like him a former regional party
secretary, Yeltsin did not enjoy being part of the Gorbachev team. He first
irritated Gorbachev when, in 1987, he asked Gorbachev to be allowed to resign
from his position as Moscow party boss – on the eve of the 70th anniversary of
the October revolution, an event Gorbachev wanted to celebrate with an image of
unity. Yeltsin was fiercely attacked at a subsequent central committee meeting
and became Gorbachev’s mortal enemy. But the new congress of people’s deputies
provided him with a platform. In 1989, campaigning as a populist critic of
party privilege and criticising perestroika for failing to improve the economy,
he swept to a landslide victory as the Moscow delegate on the congress, and a
seat on the Supreme Soviet.
Then, as independence fervour grew in the Baltics, Yeltsin
and his supporters saw the potential for developing an alternative power-centre
inside Russia itself. They were not the first to seize on what was known as the
“Russian idea”. As Gorbachev’s reforms accelerated, party conservatives looked
for a way of supplanting him. They pressed for the setting-up of a Russian
Communist party, arguing, somewhat bizarrely, that Russians had also suffered
inside the union – that the country’s national identity had been submerged into
the concept of “Soviet man”.
As resistance to reform grew within the party, Gorbachev
decided in March 1990 to create an executive presidency, which would allow him
to bypass the party altogether. Some advisers urged him to go for direct
elections, but he was afraid. He had himself elected by the Soviet parliament
instead. It turned out to be a double mistake. Yeltsin had just been elected to
the new Russian parliament. Picked as chairman, in early 1991 he followed
Gorbachev’s example and created an executive presidency, this time for Russia
alone. But Yeltsin made sure there were direct elections, which he won by a
landslide in June. Suddenly, Yeltsin looked a more democratic leader than
Gorbachev.
As Yeltsin began to outflank him, Gorbachev reacted
indecisively. In September 1990, pressures from the radicals to move towards a
market economy grew massively. For a moment, Gorbachev seemed to accept their views,
but the prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, persuaded him to resist, even though
perestroika had not produced real consumer benefits.
He also appeared indecisive on reforming the Soviet Union.
Sections of the army and the KGB were furious with his failure to stop the tide
of Baltic independence, and in January 1991 troops mounted a provocative raid
on the television tower in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, killing 14
demonstrators. The hardliners, backed by the land forces commander, General
Valentin Varennikov, hoped the incident would provoke Gorbachev into declaring
a state of emergency and clamping down. The violence shocked the liberals
around Gorbachev, although he himself took 10 days to react publicly. He
refused to take the tough action the hardliners wanted, but did not denounce
them either. It was Yeltsin who took the initiative by rushing to offer support
to the Baltic leaders.
When Gorbachev eventually re-emerged, it was clear that
Baltic independence could not be halted. He now embarked on a frenzied round of
negotiations for a looser Soviet structure in the hope that this would satisfy
the growing calls for autonomy. But known as the Novo-Ogaryovo process (from
the country house outside Moscow where the talks were held), the talks brought together
only nine of the 15 republics. The three Baltic states, plus Armenia, Georgia
and Moldova, declined to take part. Within the party, criticism of Gorbachev’s
leadership grew from all sides, and at a central committee plenary meeeting in
April 1991 he threatened to resign.
The move provoked a crisis. The hardliners had no obvious
alternative and the plenum voted to withdraw the issue of his future from the
agenda. In his 2011 interview, Gorbachev said he had erred in not resigning
from the Communist party and forming a new political party at that time. Had
that happened, he argued, he might have saved the union.
Gorbachev left for a holiday in the Crimea, planning to
return to Moscow on 20 August to sign the new union treaty his Novo-Ogaryovo
process had produced. But the hardliners thought it amounted to the end of the
Soviet Union and eight of them, including the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, the
defence minister Dmitry Yazov and Varennikov, resolved to arrest him and mount
a military coup. A delegation sent to his villa at Foros demanded he cede his
powers on the grounds of ill-health. Gorbachev refused, and even threatened to
kill himself, as he told a small group of journalists who talked to him in
Foros as soon as the coup collapsed.
The plotters claimed Gorbachev was ill, and his place was
being taken by the vice-president Gennady Yanayev. They ordered tanks to take
up key positions in Moscow. But it was all hopelessly ill-conceived and hastily
planned, and, crucially, the plotters failed to arrest Yeltsin, the directly
elected Russian president. His defiance split the army, and on the second day
of the coup the junta began to fall apart. Gorbachev was soon freed and brought
back to Moscow.
When he returned, however, he failed to understand how high
Yeltsin’s stock had risen during the coup — and how poorly the party leadership
had behaved. No one, for example, had denounced the seizure of power. So when
Gorbachev used his first press conference to talk about “renewing” the party,
most people felt he was out of touch. Four days later, he came to recognise the
new situation, resigning as general secretary and calling on the central
committee to disband itself. But, by then, Yeltsin had already issued decrees
seizing the Soviet Communist party assets and suspending the newly formed
Russian Communist party. The plotters, far from saving the Soviet Union and the
Communist parties, had only hastened their demise.
On 25 December
1991 Gorbachev resigned as president and the red flag was lowered from the
Kremlin
From then on, Gorbachev was doomed. Yeltsin put the KGB and
the Soviet foreign ministry under Russian control. In early December, he met
the leaders of the other two Slav republics, Ukraine and Belarus, in a hunting
lodge near the Polish border. They declared the Soviet Union dead. Three weeks
later, on 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president and the red flag
was lowered from the Kremlin, signifying the end of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s years in retirement were energetic and
dignified. Although Yeltsin stripped him of his limousine and pegged his
pension at a figure that hyperinflation reduced to a few pence a month, he
never denounced Yeltsin in personal or vindictive terms. He formed the
Gorbachev Foundation, funded largely by his book royalties, to conduct
research. He made an ill-starred effort to run in the 1996 Russian presidential
election, but was shut out of the state television channels and got few votes.
Like other great reformers in history, he ended up in
isolation, condemned by some for doing too much and by others for doing too
little. For the world beyond Russia, his great service lay in allowing the cold
war to come to an end. It did not end as he had hoped – in a grand
reconciliation between east and west. Indeed, in retirement he criticised
western leaders for expanding Nato to take in several of the former Soviet
republics, which he thought was unnecessary and provocative. Inside Russia, his
economic reforms failed, though not as catastrophically as those that followed
under Yeltsin.
Yeltsin’s circle blamed Gorbachev for the miserable legacy
they inherited. Gorbachev, for his part, blamed the legacy of Stalinism for the
situation he took over. He will be remembered as the man who consigned the
one-party system to oblivion and gave Russians room to breathe. Yeltsin’s
successor Vladimir Putin treated Gorbachev with respect despite Gorbachev’s
occasional criticisms of the slide back towards authoritarianism.
Oleg Morozov, a member of the main Kremlin party, United
Russia, said Gorbachev should have “repented” for mistakes that went against
Russia’s interests.
“He was a willing or an unwilling co-author of the unfair
world order that our soldiers are now fighting on the battlefield,” Morozov
said, in a reference to Russia's current war in Ukraine.
Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s pro-democracy Solidarity
movement in the 1980s and the country’s president from 1990-1995, had a more
nuanced view of Gorbachev. He said he “admired, even liked him, but did not
understand (him).”
