A Soviet leader in a million
HIS name might not mean a lot to generations of younger people, but that is often the way in life as time rushes by.
This week the world said ‘‘do svidanya’’ to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union and one of the good guys of the past few decades.
When you consider all the leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union, and their ideologydriven agendas in the last century, you can probably make Mr Gorbachev’s legacy ‘‘really good’’, especially as far as the West is concerned.
Those of us who grew up with the sabrerattling from both sides of the Iron Curtain — and the pointless prospect of nuclear armageddon and its ludicrous ‘‘mutually assured destruction’’ mindset amid the years of the Cold War — owe Mr Gorbachev so much for being the first Soviet leader to believe detente was possible and to vigorously pursue efforts to reduce the stockpile.
Mr Gorbachev, who was in power from March 1985 to December 1991, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. The honour recognised the starring role he played in bringing the Cold War to an end, and in introducing a raft of freedoms to the Soviet Union, and condoning the fall of Marxist leaderships in eastern Europe, which ultimately led to the reunification of Germany.
Aside from helping the world step back from doomsday, his actions resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 countries at the end of 1991. He survived a summer coup that year, supported by Russian president Boris Yeltsin. nuclear weapons
As well as all this, however, he was a politician who was engaging and amiable, and widely liked and respected in the West. It is hard to emphasise enough how much relief and gladness Mr Gorbachev brought to the world stage compared with the gloom of his predecessors. Unlike the grey, apparently humourless, austere Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, here finally was a man who British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously said she could ‘‘do business’’ with.
Mr Gorbachev smiled. He laughed. He made hats trendy, including his trilby. He shared some of his private life, his wife Raisa becoming almost as wellphotographed as he was. He made the words ‘‘perestroika’’ (restructuring) and ‘‘glasnost’’ (openness) part of the wider lexicon.
It was the unlikely friendship between Mr Gorbachev and United States president Ronald Reagan which underpinned the massive moves at the summits in Reykjavik in 1986 and Washington the following year to reinforce the continuing nonuse of nuclear weapons and ban the nations’ landbased shortrange and intermediaterange missiles. Nearly 2700 were destroyed in the following four years.
Unsurprisingly, current Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a Gorbachev fan, once saying the breakup of the Soviet Union was the ‘‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’’. Mr Putin has paid his respects with some roses but will not be at Mr Gorbachev’s funeral.
It will be better off without Mr
Putin, who is doing his utmost to reverse glasnost and drag Russia and neighbours back towards another Cold War.