By Dr Matthew Sussex, PhD, Australian National University — The Conversation, 31 August 2022
Few world leaders have cut a more consequential but ultimately tragic figure than Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose death at the age of 91 has been announced by Russian state media. In a way it was fitting that, as the last leader of the USSR, Gorbachev was probably its only truly humane one. He was a man who became associated with opening up Soviet society, encouraging hope and debate rather than stifling it. He sought to revitalise The USSR, foreseeing a coming century of peace in which the Soviet Union joined a “Common European Home.”
Gorbachev’s accomplishments were numerous: the negotiation of arms reduction treaties with the United States during summits with President Reagan; the admission of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster; the unilateral draw-down of Warsaw Pact forces in Europe without waiting for a reciprocal NATO agreement; the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988–9; and, perhaps most notably, the grand plan to revitalise the Soviet economy through “perestroika” (restructuring), its society via “glasnost” (openness), and its politics through “demokratizatsiya” (democratisation). Although Gorbachev was venerated in the West as the man who ended the Cold War, he became almost equally reviled at home as a foolish leader who brought about something he didn’t even intend: the collapse of The USSR. His chief reason for this was that his social reforms were far too successful while his economic reforms were an abject failure — perestroika served only to reveal how deeply inefficient and corrupt the Soviet command economy had become. The tragedy of Gorbachev was his misplaced faith in Soviet economics, and how badly he mistook the desire of the people of The USSR for national self-determination for a willingness to revitalise the Soviet idea. His enduring belief in enlightened progress stands in stark contrast to the caricature Russia resembles today under Vladimir Putin. This article has been republished under Creative Commons licence.