Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev addresses students as he visits the International University in Moscow February 9, 2012. REUTERS/Denis Sinyakov/File Photo
LONDON, Aug 31 (Reuters Breakingviews) – It is safe to assume that Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t die in the Russia he wanted to build. The former – and last – Soviet leader, who passed away in Moscow aged 91, had other plans for a bigger country, the USSR. He gave his countrymen political freedoms, and hoped that it would be enough to transform the communist behemoth into a prosperous, democratic economy. How naive he was.
After he came to power in 1985, on the heels of a rapid succession of three elderly communist leaders, Gorbachev soon gave Soviet citizens the rights to write, talk, vote and think, of which they had been deprived for seven decades. Two years later, he launched “perestroika,” a tentative transformation of the Soviet economy which had been brought to ruin by seven decades of Communism.
Easier said than done. The Soviet Union, cut off from the rest of the world, was administered by party bureaucrats, where even the smallest butcher was a state servant. The unspoken pact between citizens and politicians was that workers would “pretend to work while they pretend to pay us,” albeit in a worthless currency.
Gorbachev failed to modernize the Russian economy for many reasons. Ignorance, widely shared in Russia, about the realities of a market economy made key reforms, like the rule of law, a distant dream. His confidence in his ability to manage the transition – including in the later years a wacky plan to turn the USSR into a market economy “within 100 days” – did not help. And his indecisiveness when tough choices had to be made both disappointed his allies and worried his adversaries among the Communist party’s old guard. His hand was weakened by the Soviet Union’s implosion, as the USSR’s republics from the Baltics to the Caucasus demanded their independence. The real question, though, is whether the Soviet system could be reformed at all.
Gorbachev had become in the last 30 years an unpopular figure among Russians – at least those who remember him. They blame him for the chaos, the corruption, and the long years of economic hardships that followed the end of the Soviet Union. They tend to forget the monument to economic absurdity that was the Soviet system, already crumbling when he took over. And it was under his successor Boris Yeltsin that graft and corruption became a fundamental trait of the new Russia, which Vladimir Putin consolidated in the last 20 years.
Gorbachev understood the economic impasse the USSR was in, but failed to grasp the enormity of the challenge of reforming it. But his achievements are still substantial by the standards of today’s leaders. He ended the Cold War, the nuclear race with the U.S., withdrew his army from a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan, gave his countrymen liberties they had never enjoyed and accepted the fall of the Berlin wall. And he remains the sole example of an autocrat who chose to dismantle the very system that had made him king.
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(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
CONTEXT NEWS
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, died on Aug. 30 in Moscow, aged 91 after “a serious and protracted disease,” Russia’s Central Clinical Hospital said in a statement.
Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the ruling USSR Communist party in 1985, later becoming the country’s president. He resigned on December 1991 after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan proclaimed their independence and the end of the USSR.
Editing by Neil Unmack and Streisand Neto
Opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias.
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