He was the rare leader of a great power with humility, with the wisdom to see his deeply troubled nation as it really was, not as boosters and pundits and propagandists wanted it to be seen. And so Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War and a corrosive nuclear arms race. Dead at the age of 91, he will be remembered as a hero of history.
That heroism is underscored at a time when Vladimir Putin, who calls the collapse of the USSR a “great tragedy,” rages in a doomed attempt to put some of an empire’s pieces back together. Gorbachev led through quiet strategic strength. Putin pretends to lead through brutal, misdirected muscularity.
As with any leader of a complex nation at a time of tumult, Gorbachev made his share of bad decisions. Many were his internal critics — some who lambasted him for giving up on communism, others who blasted him for being too timid in domestic reforms. Glasnost ushered in civic openness; perestroika, new economic ways of doing things in a dangerously hidebound and corrupt system dominated by Politburo edicts. It was imperfect but, after generations of stifling repression, it was also miraculous.
If not for Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s doomed and bloody adventure in Afghanistan would’ve continued indefinitely. If not for him, tensions with the United States — led by Ronald Reagan, who had proclaimed the USSR evil — would have escalated, not calmed. The disaster at Chernobyl never would have been subject to the scrutiny of sunlight. Multiparty democracy would’ve remained a fantasy. Eastern Europe would’ve stayed under the Soviet boot. Countless political prisoners and dissidents would’ve rotted behind bars.
Gorbachev could not in the end satisfy a restive Russian and Soviet population whose material needs were still largely unmet. He gave his gasping countrymen a breath of oxygen, then watched as they demanded fresh air. But he charted a new course for his homeland and the world. We yearn to see his like again.
— New York Daily News via TNS
