Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,
whose death was announced today, was the most tragic figure in recent history. A man of high ideals but from a very constrained intellectual background, he had great achievements to his credit — and yet, lived to see almost all of them destroyed.
One of his finest legacies was that compared to the fall of other empires (including the British and French): he presided over the Soviet collapse with extraordinarily little bloodshed. And now, even that achievement is being destroyed by the post-imperial war in Ukraine.
Gorbachev made very serious mistakes — but it may well be that the combination of challenges he faced would have defeated the greatest of statesmen. No other leader in history has been forced fundamentally to reform a semi-developed but irrational and sclerotic economic system while at the same time transforming a vast multinational empire, even as the ideology that held that empire together was disintegrating around him. The nearest historical parallel is with the reformers of the Ottoman Empire in the decades before its final collapse — and they also failed disastrously.
To understand both Gorbachev’s idealism and his naivete about the Soviet system, it is vital to understand the real successes achieved by the USSR. Indeed, Gorbachev himself was one of them. He was born to a poor peasant family of mixed Russian and Ukrainian origin in Stavropol Province of the northern Caucasus. The Soviet system and the Communist Party educated him and gave him enormous opportunities. His father was wounded in the Red Army during the Second World War, and Gorbachev was 14 years old when that army won its great victory over Nazi Germany.
In the years that followed, he witnessed the Soviet technological and engineering achievements of the 1950s and 1960s. Later, as First Secretary of the Stavropol Communist Party, he presided over one of the last of these, the Great Stavropol Canal. He experienced Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” and the idealism of that period seems to have stayed with him, surviving the gray authoritarian “stagnation” of the Brezhnev years. This was also fed by classical Russian literature, much of which (at least in its Soviet selection) had a highly idealistic cast.
Like Khrushchev (though without his peasant coarseness), Gorbachev was therefore an entirely Soviet product, and despite his great intelligence, there were things he was not equipped to see. One was that the crimes of Communism did not begin with Stalin, but with Lenin, and therefore if fully revealed, would compromise the entire ideology on which the Soviet system depended. Another was the power of nationalism.
Gorbachev seems genuinely to have believed in the brotherhood of Soviet peoples. Being half-Ukrainian himself, national hatred between Ukrainians and Russians was to him literally unimaginable.
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