If you have studied Cold War history, then the name “Mikhail Gorbachev” will be incredibly familiar to you, what with his Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) policies.
He is the first and last President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the character with an exaggerated birthmark on his head in historical caricatures, and one of the catalysts of Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
He is also that one political figure who is rumoured to be dead at least once every single year.
It’s real this time though.
News of His Death
On 30 August 2022, Mikhail Gorbachev passed away, at age 91.
According to a statement by Russia’s Central Clinical Hospital, Gorbachev died of a serious and protracted disease.
The last Soviet President will be buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife Raisa Titorenko, who passed away in 1999.
His Legacy
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931, into a peasant family that lived in the southern Russian region of Stavropol. Both of his grandfathers were detained under Joseph Stalin’s rule.
In 1950, he pursued a law degree at Moscow University, the country’s most prestigious educational institution. This was also where he met his future wife, Raisa.
Afterwards, Gorbachev joined the Communist Party, making quick work of the ranks. By 1970, he was the top party official for Stavropol and the Soviet Union’s youngest regional leader.
In 1978, he was transferred to Moscow as the national party secretary for agriculture.
Two years later, Gorbachev became the youngest full member of the Politburo, the principal policy making committee in the USSR, where he became a protégé of Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader in 1982.
Upon Andropov’s death in 1984, Gorbachev took over the mantle of leading the Soviet Union.
The Collapse of USSR
When Gorbachev came into power, the Soviet Union was already crumbling internally.
Due to US president Ronald Reagan, the arms races incited by the Cold War became heated once more, accelerating Soviet defence spending dramatically. This meant that more resources were being directed towards the military instead of social and economic progress.
The cogs and gears of the Soviet Union were dysfunctional at best; chronic alcoholism was rampant in the Soviet Union, worker absenteeism and nepotism within the political circles was at an all-time high. Dissent was accumulating and festering behind the Iron Curtain.
Hence, Gorbachev set about trying to revitalise the USSR by introducing limited political and economic freedoms—namely perestroika which decentralised economic controls and encouraged (the already failing) enterprises to be self-financing, so as to put an end to the economic stagnation, and glasnost which encouraged the freedom of speech.
Unfortunately, his reforms spun out of his control.
The public opinion—once suppressed and mostly underground—turned against the party and state.
It worsened even further in April 1986, when the Chernobyl disaster happened. The accident revealed the deficiencies of the Soviet system and people were finally allowed to speak out about it
In his own memoirs, Gorbachev wrote, “Chernobyl shed light on many of the sicknesses of our system as a whole.”
Having seen that Gorbachev was a much more liberal leader compared to his geriatric predecessors, emboldened nationalists of Soviet satellite states started protesting for independence.
Gorbachev never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse; he struggled in vain to stop it.
By 1989, numerous protests broke out in Uzbekistan, Georgia and the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Azerbaijan was beginning to wage war against Armenia.
Unlike the previous Kremlin leaders who answered rebellions with force (Read: Hungary in 1958 and Czechoslovakia in 1986), Gorbachev did not squash the pro-democracy protests ruthlessly with an iron fist.
Fifteen states eventually broke away from the Soviet union bloc in the next two years.
The most obvious sign of the imminent collapse was when the Berlin Wall was torn down on 9 November 1989; for it was the greatest symbol of the separation and competition between the two warring ideologies.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
Although the coup d’état staged by conservative Communists failed that August, it was ultimately Boris Yeltsin who reaped the benefits of stopping the coup as he was named the national hero.
Erstwhile Gorbachev was held under house arrest in a Crimean resort.
His Nobel Prize
Admittedly, Gorbachev played a huge role in de-escalating the arms race.
The Soviet President kept a constant line of communication with President Reagan, meeting him in Geneva in 1985, Reykjavik in 1986, and Washington in 1987.
The third meeting was the most significant: the two countries signed a treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
In acknowledgement of his efforts in paving the way for reconciliation between the East and West, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
The West certainly loved Gorbachev for his political views and how he unintentionally dismantled the Soviet system.
The Russians, however, scorned him.
President Putin is a known critic of Gorbachev, having called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” in the 20th century in 2005.
Putin also said that he would reverse the collapse of the USSR if it was at all possible.
In any case, Gorbachev may be dead, but he will live in history forever, endlessly judged.
Featured Image: Shutterstock / Evgeny Eremeev