He was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev – the man who made Glasnost (transparency) and Perestroika (economic reform) household words far beyond the Soviet Union he fought to reform. To the young people I watched greet him hungrily in East Germany in 1989 as a symbol that change was possible, he was simply “Gorby,” a projection of hopes for reforms which would prove impossible inside the Communist straitjacket, but a projection of hope and optimism.
To world leaders in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he was a man (as she put it) “We can do business with”. He was able to negotiate across the ideological lines of the late Cold War and clink glass in the evening, telling stories of his childhood and path to power in the country and system he believed in as an ambitious young Communist, but where the power he inherited over Soviet communism and its dominions was crumbling from within.
Gorbachev’s death after a long illness at 91 also marks the passing of a generation who grew up under Stalinism and would spend the rest of their lives struggling with its legacy in Russian society. From a family in the agricultural south of the country – with a mixed Russian-Ukrainian heritage – he would recall that the family “icons” were a mixture of traditional Russian religious iconography and Marxist-Leninist ephemera. And though he chose the classic Soviet political path – a law degree in Moscow and full-time work as a party official in his home regional – a fast riser inside the system, returning to Moscow to join the Central Committee and Politburo in the late 1970s.
After the “leaden times” of stagnation under Brezhnev and short-lived, elderly figures in the top job, Gorbachev’s energetic positioning as a technocrat from outside the Moscow elite, as well as his increasingly forthright denunciations of the corruption and repression of the Soviet system, propelled him to power in the 1980s.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 and initial attempt at a cover-up strengthened his hand in demanding “Glasnost” – openness about what was going wrong at home. In the following years, he would bring to Russia a freedom of debate and challenge it had not known since before the Revolution– and which are now once again under the heel of autocracy. The restructuring of vast economy fared less well and as reforms foundered in practice, the leader’s grip on power became less certain and schisms inside the party between conservatives and reformers widened.
Ironically, his time of greatest influence abroad came when he supported reforms in Eastern Europe and accepted the inevitability of a retreat in Moscow’s sphere of influence. When protestors in East German, the then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and other former satellites demanded change, it was to “Gorby” they turned for support. “You decide your own futures,” was his pointed message to young people in East Berlin chafing at the sclerotic rule of Erich Honecker. And with the fall of the Berlin Wall, they did.
International events coincided with the rise of pressures at home, culminating in the coup attempt in 1991, which he narrowly defeated (with the help of the rising Russian leader Boris Yeltsin). That led to the decision which has dogged Gorbachev’s domestic reputation to this day – the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, derided by Vladimir Putin as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, opening the door to separatist movements. But in truth, once Soviet power retained by force and fear aboard was in retreat, Moscow’s grip on the Soviet republics – first the Baltics and then Ukraine and others, inevitably loosened. A system held together by force could not endure when the bonds were loosened.
In the years that followed, Gorbachev would become a far more popular figure abroad than at home, where the shock of the collapse of a mighty state has been laid at his door. It has left him a nationally unpopular figure, though one remembered in the country’s liberal circuit as the man who brought back freedoms of association, speech and publication.
After his time in office, he became a co-founder and supported of “Novaya Gazeta” the main liberal newspaper. That paper’s editor Dimitri Muratov received the Nobel Prize last year for the paper’s fearless reporting of corruption, resulting in the murders of many of its journalists. When I interviewed Muratov the day after he was in a car on the way to celebrate the prize with the terminally ill Gorbachev. “It would not have been possible to keep this going without him,” Muratov told me. The paper has since been forced to stop publishing, at the behest of the Russian censor, until the end of the war in Ukraine.
In late life, Gorbachev’s views of Putin veered between the forthright assessment that the President’s desire to remain in power indefinitely was “an obstacle to progress” – and a countervailing tendency to support the foreign policy angles of Putinism (notably the annexation of Crimea) and to indulge the view that the conflict had been unleashed by the West, rather than the attempt to recreate a large part of the Soviet Union by force at the behest of President Putin.
Yet in his personal commitments, Gorbachev never lost his desire for Russia to face outwards. He enjoyed the company of western journalists and statesmen – the snapshot I have of interviewing him in Russia shows a man relishing the cut and thrust of debate, teaching me Russian proverbs, with his distinctive southern Russian twang, and offering a glass of cherry brandy at the end of the encounter.
When Aleksandr Lebedev bought the Evening Standard at the end 2009, Gorbachev was once of the first visitors and my job was to stumble through some Russian words of welcome and catch up with a man I had last interviewed in the maelstrom of post-Soviet Russia. Gorbachev was never a brief speaker and, on this occasion, started a long disquisition on the need to find a “middle way between socialism and capitalism”. That has turned out to be as elusive a goal as his desire to reform Soviet power. The disastrous war in Ukraine and gradual extinction of the freedoms he opened up against the odds in Russia leaves a legacy of mourning in more ways than one.
