President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987
Photo:
jerome delay/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Mikhail Gorbachev,
who died Tuesday at age 91, was a paradoxical Soviet leader when the world needed one. He had almost total power upon taking office but undertook reforms that undermined that power. He rose through the Communist ranks but presided over the end of the regime. His greatest achievement was allowing the Cold War to end without a war or a worse conflagration that the world feared for decades.
Gorbachev is famous as the architect of “perestroika,” or restructuring, and “glasnost,” or openness. They were radical concepts in the 1980s after decades of Stalinist and totalitarian Communist rule. But the eighth and last leader of the Soviet era did not adopt those concepts out of liberal democratic conviction.
He understood that the country he inherited in 1985 when he became general secretary of the Communist Party was losing the Cold War to a revitalized West. Its economy wasn’t the juggernaut of central-planning genius that the CIA had assessed at the time. It couldn’t deliver consumer goods of any quality to its people, as anyone who visited the country during that period could observe.
Ronald Reagan
had reversed the U.S. malaise of the 1970s with a defense buildup and reforms that unleashed America’s private economy. Western leaders had deployed medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe despite a furious Soviet propaganda campaign. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, though it never fulfilled its largest ambitions, convinced many Russians that they couldn’t compete with U.S. technology and vitality. Gorbachev’s reforms were intended to revive the Soviet regime to be able to compete with Reagan’s America.
As is often the case when a tyranny eases up, his reforms released forces that he and the Party couldn’t control. Perestroika wasn’t far-reaching enough to bring prosperity, while glasnost inspired domestic critics and demands for further change. The countries of Eastern Europe, long enslaved as members of the Warsaw Pact, saw their moment to break free. Gorbachev refused to send in the tanks as his Soviet predecessors had done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that Gorbachev and Reagan struck in 1987 did not turn out to be the first step toward nuclear disarmament. The U.S. withdrew from it in 2019 after
cheating became intolerable. But the deal did build mutual trust between Gorbachev and Reagan, and later
George H.W. Bush,
and those relationships helped to bring the Cold War to an end with freedom as the victor. Gorbachev couldn’t manage Russia’s post-Soviet politics and he resigned in 1991.
Many Russians, not least Mr. Putin, blame Gorbachev for the fall of their empire. Mr. Putin has tried to restore Greater Russia, playing to Russian nationalism and using military force. But he hasn’t been able to turn Russia into a first-world, developed economy. And he hasn’t been able to subdue Ukraine, despite brutal methods that echo of earlier Soviet leaders.
Gorbachev gave Russians their chance to forge a better future, and the great tragedy is that they haven’t been able to do so.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8