was the general secretary of the Central Committee for the Communist Party in the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. He was then head of state of the Soviet Union from 1988 until 1991. He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Gorbachev believed in reforming his country towards openness and limiting nuclear capabilities, eventually ending the Cold War and bringing down the Iron Curtain. But while bringing hope and optimism to the world, he also led the Soviet Union to an end.

Two books were published practically simultaneously in Great Britain and France to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the breakup of the Soviet Union 

 by Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française.

Both were dedicated to the exceptional historic event of the end of the 20th century — the Soviet 

 and its leader and symbol Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev and Reagan, White House/Getty Images

 started as the “continuation of the October Revolution”. But on the contrary, put an end to the unprecedented social experiment of conducting the utopian communist project launched by Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks 70 years earlier.

In the opinion of another famous British historian, Sir Eric Hobsbawm, two events marked the 20th century: first, the global crisis of capitalism leading to the First World War. And then the tragedy of the Second World War, luckily escaping the third event which would have been the last, with a good chance of becoming nuclear, “Had it not been for Gorbachev!” concludes the author.

The unprecedented political breakthrough realized during the years of 

 allowed Soviet Russia to catch up with world history and break the walls of the besieged fortress inside which it had been kept by the repressive regime. For the first time in Russian history, its citizens gained the right to free elections, freedom of speech and access to pluralist sources of information.

 was to seek to give a second chance to the project of socialist renovation of Russia. Dreaming about the merging of the socialist ideal with democracy, he had in mind the image of the “socialism with a human face,” similar to the project of the Communist reformers of the Prague Spring of 1968.

The complexity of his task was based on an ambiguity: Gorbachev was obliged to destroy the totalitarian system using the only political tool that he had at his disposal—the one-party State. But 

 very quickly provoked the resistance and opposition of conservative forces concerned with losing their privileged positions.

Another challenge he faced consisted in achieving an economic reform that would allow the Soviet Union to build a competitive economic model combining markets with the social concerns of the Soviet citizens.

The basic precondition for this was the ending of the arms race with the West, which was forcing the Soviet Union to spend a disproportionate part of its national budget for military purposes, thereby affecting the living standards of its population. 

Yet, despite the huge price that the Soviet Union was paying for the maintenance of its superpower status, by the 1980's the country was living a situation of unprecedented political isolation, engaged in various conflicts not only with its Western adversaries but also with China and the Muslim world, particularly after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

with the West as well as suggesting to the Reagan administration an ambitious program of nuclear disarmament, Gorbachev sought to stop the nuclear race and change the image of the USSR as a source of military danger to the outside world.

In the several years of his new foreign policy, the world changed radically. The climate of political confrontation dissipated, Soviet and American middle range nuclear missiles were removed from Europe, Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan and the territories of Warsaw Pact members. And finally, the sad symbol of the Cold War—the Berlin Wall—was destroyed, opening the road to the unification of Germany.

In October 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “leading role in the promotion of the peace process as an important component in the life of the world community.” Yet he was obliged to decline the invitation to participate in the ceremony in Oslo since he was facing an acute political crisis at home provoked by the unprecedented scale of the reforms he had initiated.

After six years of the dramatic political changes that 

 introduced into Soviet society, ordinary people were impatient to obtain the “dividends” of democracy in their daily life, but economic crisis aggravated the political confrontation inside society unleashed by the conflict between radical reformers and conservatives.

In these times of unprecedented transition, the Western partners of Gorbachev were not inclined to share with the Soviet State the “dividends of peace” and the unexpected ending of the Cold War which they owed to 

Gorbachev’s pleas to assist the Russian economy at this stage of its radical transformation were rejected twice when addressed to the leaders of the G7 at their meetings in Houston and London. The explanation that they were not economically “rentable.”

Very quickly, Gorbachev had to realize that ending the Cold War was easier than transforming and democratizing Russian society and resisting the attacks of his political opponents. The weakening of the repressive mechanism of the central State offered a chance for the activation of nationalist and separatist movements, threatening the integrity of the federal State.

In August 1991, as in August 1968, the Soviet tanks were sent by the organizers of the anti-Gorbachev groups into Moscow. And in December of the same year, another political conspiracy —a plot staged by his political rivals, the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine— sped up the dissolution of the Soviet Union and forced Gorbachev to resign from his position as its President.

The then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, reads a statement while standing on the roof of an armored vehicle in Moscow, after the 

Gorbachev himself considered the dissolution of the Soviet Union as one of most important failures of his action. He believed that the federal State uniting historically, and culturally close and interdependent nations could be maintained in the form of a voluntary democratic union that would be inspired by the example of the European Union.

He was also convinced that existence of such a kind of geo-strategic alliance of nations occupying the vast area ranging from the Baltic and the Black Sea and reaching the Pacific in the Far East could serve as a factor of stabilization of the chaotic international landscape that emerged after the end of the Cold War and which was not based on the principles of “New Political Thinking” but on the “Right of the Might” and was subject to the violence of extremist forces.

Unfortunately, after the resignation of Gorbachev, Russia and the West did not find the common exit from the Cold War and ended it not as partners but as rivals. Instead of becoming part of the common “European home” designed by Gorbachev, post-Soviet Russia is at the periphery of the world politics and observes with growing resentment the competition between major world players for the partition of the succession of the Soviet Union.

But Western politics too is obliged to pay a high price for the loss of “the chance of Gorbachev.” The fact that in the West the peaceful ending of the Cold War is seen as the historic capitulation of the Soviet Union, contributes to the feelings of national humiliation within Russian society and nourishes anti-Western and nationalist tendencies in its foreign policy and the wish for historic revenge.

This article is my edit of Dr Andrei Grachev's original work, who was the adviser for Mikhail Gorbachev and official Spokesman of the President of the USSR until his resignation in December 1991. You can find the original 

How Mikhail Gorbachev changed the world

0 Comments