Gorbachov

I am a child of the Cold War.

I grew up witnessing the Russian crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and later I underwent nuclear attack drills in school during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

I saw how under Brezhnev, the Russians violently put down the Prague Spring in 1968, ending Alexander Dubcek’s dream of communism with a human face.

I learned about how the Soviet Union tried to put an end to the Eurocommunism dreams of Enrico Berlinguer in Italy and Santiago Carillo in Spain as they too sought to change the face of communism into a modern political force capable of sustaining human rights, freedom of assembly, movement, and speech.

At a private lunch in Madrid in 1990 Carrillo waxed eloquent about how the USSR was changing thanks to the vision of one man – Mikhail Gorbachev – who had come to power in 1985 with a policy of glasnost and perestroika – openness and reform – and how he realised that the old Soviet model was obsolete and, if the USSR were to survive, it would have to change.

He was right in one aspect – the USSR had to change. But he was wrong in thinking that the USSR could survive the change. Once unleashed, the forces of modernization took the USSR down a path of irreversible transformation and Soviet citizens down a path of rejection of the old system.

Mr. Gorbachev proved unable to manage this transformation. When the KGB rebelled and were put down under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Gorbachev’s days and, indeed, the days of the USSR, were numbered.

Mr. Gorbachev became the darling of the West – the leader who ended the Cold war without a shot being fired, and who ended the brutal subjugation of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian republics.

But Russians saw him as a vacillator -- uncommitted to representative democracy or a mixed economy yet departing from the communist orthodoxy that had governed the USSR since 1917.

Soon after the attempted putsch by KGB hardliners, Mr. Yeltsin took over and oversaw the dissolution of the USSR and the eventual emergence of Russia as a freewheeling state that, under him, lacked any structure or direction. Mr. Yeltsin proved to be a disaster, drunk most of the time and leaving the Russian Federation open to manipulation by undemocratic forces. 

Former KGB officers slowly took over key parts of the economy and became the oligarchs of today, robbing billions along the way. 

Politically the KGB managed the elevate one of their own through the ranks of Russian politics – Vladimir Putin.

In 2000 Mr. Putin took over from a dissolute Mr. Yeltsin and quickly moved to create an authoritarian state in which he promised Russians order and stability. He made the oligarchs beholden to him and him alone. He terminated the free press and arrested opponents often on trumped up charges. 

Mr. Gorbachev retired to an ignoble existence in Russia while feted in the West.

Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy for Russians will always be of a leader who had a dream of creating communism with a human face, but he could not carry out the plan thanks to conservative forces which engineered a coup attempt to derail his project. 

His vision was unrealistic given that Russians had no experience with freedom of any type and that removing government control could and eventually did lead to anarchy.

Communism depended on force to keep people in line and maintain power, since free elections (which Mr. Gorbachev did not espouse) would dilute power and lead to the vagaries of a nascent democratic experiment that could not survive in a country that had never known the concepts of compromise and consensus.

His legacy in the West will always be of a leader who sought to make the world a safer place through negotiations with the West, cooperation on the United Nations Security Council, and the freeing of East European states from the Soviet yoke.

That he could not carry out his plan is a shame.

In his place, Mr. Putin’s Russia embraces the worst aspects of the USSR both in domestic and international terms.

He challenges the world with his expansionist dreams and attempts destabilize the international order. He works with other authoritarian leaders to bring liberal democracy to an end and create a new world order based on force and oppression.

Unfortunately, this has become Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy to many.

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Edición: Laura Espejo