Glasnost and perestroika policies result in divided legacy for Soviet leader

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV changed the course of modern history by triggering the demise of the USSR and allowing Eastern Europe to free itself from Soviet rule, earning him accolades in the West but the scorn of many Russians.

By championing reforms in order to achieve glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), Gorbachev inadvertently unleashed forces that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his own ouster.

Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, forged arms reduction deals with the United States, as well as partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the Second World War and bring about the reunification of Germany.

But his internal reforms helped weaken the Soviet Union to the point where it fell apart. It was a moment that president Vladimir Putin has called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Over the past decades, an increasingly frail Gorbachev had an ambiguous relation with Putin – backing the former KGB agent in a new stand-off with the West over Ukraine, but criticising him for turning the clock back on democracy in Russia.

In an op-ed published in government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in December 2016, days ahead of the 25th anniversary of his resignation, Gorbachev recognised his share of responsibility in the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“But my conscience is clean,” he wrote. “I defended the Union until the end, acting through political means.”

Born on March 2, 1931, into a peasant family in Russia’s southern Stavropol region, Gorbachev grew up with the hardships of the Second World War and the repressive rule of dictator Joseph Stalin, whose regime sentenced his grandfather to nine years in a labour camp.

As a boy Gorbachev was bright and hard working. At 16 he was awarded the Red Banner of Labour for helping in a record harvest, and in 1950 he won a coveted place at Moscow State University to study law. Five years later, the ambitious graduate and his young wife Raisa moved back to Stavropol, where he began a rapid rise through the ranks of the Communist Party, becoming the youngest member of the Politburo, at age 49, in 1979.

He took over the world’s biggest state and second superpower in 1985, when he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party.

At 54 and full of fresh ideas, Gorbachev was a startling contrast to the geriatric ideologues previously in control of the Kremlin.

His foreign policy choices sent shockwaves through the world order. He defused the US-Soviet nuclear standoff with a series of disarmament agreements, withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and loosened the reins on the leadership of Moscow’s Eastern European satellite countries.

At home, his perestroika and glasnost policies set off seismic changes. Thousands of political prisoners were freed.

His encouragement of freedom at home quickened the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Soviet empire.

From the Baltic republics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, independence movements and inter-ethnic strife shook the seemingly invincible structure of Soviet domination, while glasnost brought wave upon wave of embarrassing revelations about the Soviet Union’s dark past.

In 1989, Eastern Europe countries threw out their Communist governments and the Berlin Wall was torn down.

In 1990, Gorbachev was elected the first and final president of the Soviet Union, but within months had to contend with a revolt by hardline communists.

The August 1991 coup failed, but it was the defiant Boris Yeltsin who faced it down and became a national hero, while Gorbachev was held under house arrest far away in a Crimean resort.

Soon after, that the Soviet Union vanished and with it Gorbachev’s position.