Mikhail Gorbachev failed, but not badly enough to prevent Putin
Mikhail Gorbachev failed at everything he tried as the Soviet Union’s last leader. The state he led could only change the world for the better by failing — and it did. But, alas, not for long. This is going to be somewhat of a harrowing obituary.
Gorbachev’s entire record atop the Soviet hierarchy was that of a flailing, clueless loser, always one step behind the times. He started out as Communist Party leader in 1985 with a campaign to eradicate drunkenness, which created endless lines for vodka and ruined winemaking in Moldova for decades to come because vines were mowed down. Russians only drank more and more as the Soviet economy collapsed.
Gorbachev launched an economic “acceleration” drive that sank like a lead balloon because it stopped well short of embracing capitalism. He thought he was bringing communism closer to the people rather than dismantling it. In a memoir, Gorbachev quoted his own notes from 1985: “The current propaganda of Marxism is boring, young people are losing interest. … If we want new policies to gain support, we need to restore faith in Socialist ideals.”
Shortages were atrocious. I remember a year without toilet paper in Moscow, the capital. While growing up in Siberia, my wife doesn’t recall using anything but smeary newsprint for hygiene. Store shelves emptied of everything but three-liter jars of sweetened birch sap.
Nothing worked. Amid the economic mismanagement, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up in 1986, and Gorbachev, the originator of glasnost — that is, his policy of “openness” — waited 18 days to address the nation about it, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to be exposed to the fallout.
Gorbachev permitted more media freedom. As a result, the whole country was soon reading and hearing on TV about previous crimes of a regime that refused to prosecute the perpetrators, many of whom were still alive as honored retirees.
When people in the former Soviet republics began rebelling and demanding independence, he — to put it generously — did little to prevent bloody crackdowns, even if there’s no clear evidence that he ordered them himself. As early as 1986, nationalist protests in Almaty, Kazakhstan, were put down with a massive show of force. Two of the protesters received death sentences.
In April, 1991, the Soviet military killed 21 protesters and wounded hundreds more in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Jumber Patiashvili, who headed the Communist Party in Georgia at the time, would later accuse Gorbachev of sending in the troops.
In 1990, Gorbachev, apparently alarmed by what he had unleashed, began rolling back the media liberalization. He appointed hardliners to key positions, from TV chief to interior minister. Many of these would depose him in the failed August 1991 coup. Still upon being reinstated by his arch-enemy, Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev would fail to hold on to power. He finally witnessed the Soviet Union’s demise.
He didn’t just fail as an autocrat, squandering the near-unlimited power handed to him as party boss; he also failed as a politician despite his penchant for unscripted speeches and mixing with people in public squares. When he tried to run for president of Russia in 1996 — in an election that was free but not exactly fair and that returned Yeltsin to the Kremlin for a second term — he won 0.51% of the vote.
Gorbachev won praise in the West as a highly pliable negotiator on international affairs. But he failed to secure anything for the Soviet Union besides paltry economic aid. The dying colossus burned through those funds in a matter of months. That’s contributed to the nationalist resentment at the heart of Russia’s current imperialist resurgence.
Vladimir Putin has explicitly blamed Gorbachev for not getting a written promise from the U.S. not to expand NATO. He’s also blamed him, implicitly, for the Soviet Union’s breakup. But Gorbachev regretted the demise of the USSR as much as Putin does. Although he had his disagreements with Putin, whom he deemed too illiberal, Gorbachev said as late as 2019 that he considered Putin “faithful to democracy.”
Putin has learned from Gorbachev’s mistakes, of course. His rollback of Russia’s freedoms and his return to imperialist aspirations was gradual, almost stealthy, and quietly consistent. He never dropped the ball where Gorbachev couldn’t help fumbling it. Gorbachev used to argue that a new, freer generation has grown up since the Soviet Union’s end, but, for all the hopes invested in it, this generation has been unable to put up anything like the unyielding resistance I was a part of in the Gorbachev era.
There is one thing I will miss about Gorbachev. He was so bad at leading an evil empire because he was too obviously human. He was carelessly emotional, incapable of keeping a poker face and — amazingly for a career party functionary — blind to intrigue. Breaking with a long tradition, he didn’t hide his love and admiration for his wife Raisa — and later his grief at her death.
Darth Vader wore armor; not Gorbachev. Most contemporary leaders lack this natural humanity — not just Putin. It’s a hindrance to political efficiency, of course. But it is perhaps why Gorbachev’s attempt to hold together a malevolent enterprise failed.