Gorbachev changed history’s course, for a while

Mikhail Gorbachev became part of a history he did not intend to create. He was among the most prominent historical personages of the last century, and he walked with history. He is both reviled and admired not only in Russia, which is the core of the empire that he caused to dismantle, but also in the wider world, where his policies and decisions caused great political and strategic imbalance. He is blamed for the enfeeblement of the idea of socialism and, as a longer consequence, for the ideological and structural failure of the Communist State and the rise of the new right in many parts of the world. He is praised for ending the Cold War and easing the balance of nuclear terror between the West, led by the US, and the Soviet Union. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is a pivot of world history and nothing that has happened since could be explained without reference to that point. That is why Gorbachev is important.

Gorbachev had set out to reform the declining Soviet economy with his perestroika (restructuring) and to open up the society, which was behind an ‘iron curtain’, with glasnost. He sensed both aims were linked but arguably failed in both, perhaps because their linkages are different in different societies. While he failed, neighbouring China made a success of perestroika, implemented in its own way, but without glasnost. After experimenting with glasnost for a brief while and sliding into near-anarchy, Russia has gone back to the rigid structure of the State, much in the Soviet style but modelled on older Russian templates. Russia has also gone back to being a resource-based economy of the primitive kind, with only vestiges of its scientific and industrial basis remaining and its superpower status living only in its nuclear profile.

It is a matter of debate whether Gorbachev believed he could change the Soviet system into a humane, democratic, socialist order. He wanted to improve relations with the West, but the entrenched Russian worldview against the West has prevailed. In that view, the West would only try to smother Russia. Much of Russia’s relations with the West would only be explained in that framework. It is a difficult question whether history threw up a person it needed then, or he decided to give history a push in the direction he thought it needed to move. He would certainly not have come to bury the Soviet Union but to change it, but it collapsed, along with the world order in which it had a prime place. It is again a matter of predilection whether to judge him by his intentions or their consequences.