The contradictory legacy of Soviet leader who attempted ‘revolution from above’

Mikhail Gorbachev was a contradictory figure; his legacy, complex. Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people – which he genuinely was – he increasingly became despised by many within Russia for destroying the Soviet Union and dismantling a great power.

Either way, he was consequential. Indeed, his death at 91, announced by state media in Russia on Aug. 30, 2022, comes as the ripples of the transformation he helped engineer continue to be felt. The invasion of Ukraine is, in part, an attempt to reverse the loss of status felt in post-Cold War Russia by the disintegration of the Soviet Union that occurred under Gorbachev – something Vladimir Putin views as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” In a sense, the unraveling of the Soviet Union that began 30 years ago is still going on now, in the bloody war in Ukraine.

Of course, that is not how he is perceived in the West. After enduring Western suspicions when he first came to power that he was simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an insincere reformer who was really a hard-line communist, Gorbachev managed to convince the skeptics abroad of his sincerity. U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found in Gorbachev someone she could “do business with.” Then, through her, U.S. President Ronald Reagan came around to the view that Gorbachev was indeed an authentic dismantler of the Soviet command system.

Early fears in the West evolved into anxiety about Gorbachev’s survival as he embarked on his great project. He was a reformer aspiring to be a revolutionary from above, wanting to liberalize and democratize his country to save socialism.

But in the process, he ended up undermining socialism as the major alternative to Western neoliberal capitalism. His rushed reforms to modernize the Soviet Union were overtaken by developments on the ground that saw the socialist project fall, to be replaced by a new era in Russia marked by growing nationalism and renewed authoritarianism.

A bald older man with a dark suit is seen waving, with other men around him. Who was Mikhail Gorbachev and where did he come from?

Born in 1931 in southern Russia as the son of peasants, the young Gorbachev learned about the horrors of Stalinist repressions from his grandfathers, both of whom had suffered imprisonment. Physically strong and exceptionally bright, Gorbachev went on to study law at Moscow State University and soon embarked on a steady rise as a Communist Party official.

A faithful apparatchik, he knew the pathologies of the system: the stultifying, self-serving bureaucracy, repression of free expression, bloated military spending, and lack of initiative and productivity of workers and peasants. Once he achieved the highest position in the party of general secretary in 1985 he embarked on a pell-mell program of reform. It was centered on two ideas, that of “perestroika” – the restructuring the political and economic system – and “glasnost” – the end of censorship and the introduction of freedom of speech and the press.

But from the start, the economic reforms proved to be flawed. Mammoth problems, including the fall in the world price of oil – the USSR’s greatest source of foreign exchange – a devastating earthquake in Armenia and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster impoverished the country and eroded Gorbachev’s popularity at home.

His foreign policy achievements – the withdrawal from war in Afghanistan, liberating the Soviet satellite states in East Central Europe and the reduction of nuclear arms – won him friends abroad.

But many of his closest comrades at home, particularly in the military and KGB, the state security service, were appalled by his surrender of what they considered the gains from the victory over fascism in World War II. On Gorbachev’s watch, the Soviet Union rapidly declined from a superpower into a pathetically weak state begging for financial help from the George H.W. Bush administration, which never came through. He allowed the two German states, separated during the Cold War by the Berlin Wall into a Western and a Soviet-controlled sector, to reunite without gaining much from the deal.

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