“I want to preempt history, to say that, in general, Gorbachev is a good guy”

On the evening of August 30, it became known about the death of Mikhail Gorbachev. The last Soviet leader died in the Central Clinical Hospital at the age of 92. Kommersant invites its readers to remember what they praised and scolded him for during his time in power and after his resignation.

“The Party and the government, the entire Soviet people suffered a heavy loss: after a long and prolonged illness, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, died.” These words could be spoken today by the mourning announcers of the two channels of Central Television if Mikhail Gorbachev had not interrupted the tradition of his predecessors to leave the office in the Kremlin exclusively feet first. During his lifetime – and even during his reign – Mikhail Gorbachev was gone, neither the Soviet Union, nor his Communist Party, nor its general secretary. Some see this as the greatest tragedy or even catastrophe, blaming Mikhail Gorbachev for all conceivable mistakes and even crimes. Others are aware that without Gorbachev, modern Russia would hardly have been possible, and the world in which it has existed for the past thirty years would probably have lost much of the optimism and hope that filled it until recently.

Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in a world that seemed to be moving towards a dead end. The period of détente in the 1970s was long gone; the downing of a Korean Boeing and numerous peripheral conflicts made the threat of a global nuclear war less and less illusory. The Soviet economy was not yet showing clear symptoms of an impending collapse, but the country was already facing shortages and a growing shortage of funds to pay for necessary imports – against the backdrop of absolute party control over the media, in which messages about the achievements of socialism were interspersed with obituaries of Soviet dying one after another. leaders. Against this bleak background, the appearance of a relatively young politician, who easily neglects Soviet rituals and is able to maintain a free conversation with ordinary people under television cameras, standing right in the crowd, in itself inspired hope for changes – despite the faces of the guards in civilian clothes clearly visible behind the new Secretary General. The country first learned and then got used to new words, some of which migrated to European languages ​​without translation: acceleration, glasnost, perestroika. A native of the Stavropol Regional Committee of the CPSU and a graduate of the law faculty of Moscow State University, Mikhail Gorbachev began to quickly replace tired old men from the Politburo with his more energetic peers; foreign “voices” were still heard by many, but inside the country it became possible to publicly discuss what it was preferable to keep quiet just a few months ago. On the foreign policy front, not just a new détente loomed, but the idea of ​​nuclear disarmament and even the complete renunciation of nuclear weapons was included on the agenda at the highest level.

The first hopes, however, were quickly overshadowed: the absurdity of the last Soviet anti-alcohol campaign was superimposed on the growing shortage of everything from tobacco to washing powder. The man-made disaster in Chernobyl, the earthquake in Armenia, the first flashes of interethnic conflicts on the periphery – all this created the ground for literally apocalyptic expectations. Which coexisted with hopes of renewal until the Soviet Union collapsed and a completely different story began.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who left his office in the Kremlin 30 years before his death, had a chance to fully face both praise and blasphemy. He was praised mainly for his foreign policy – it led to some retreat from the edge of the abyss, on which the two superpowers of that time were balancing within the framework of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, and to the collapse of the system of political dependence of Central and Eastern Europe on the USSR, including the reunification of Germany. They blamed, however, for the same foreign policy – they blamed it for agreeing with the loss of the Soviet sphere of influence, almost creating the prerequisites for NATO expansion to the east, although it seemed like he could get a legally binding obligation from his partners in the West to prevent such expansion . Mikhail Gorbachev himself, by the way, answered these accusations in the sense that almost until the end of his tenure in power, the structures created by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, were preserved, so the expansion of NATO was simply out of context, and it became possible already after the collapse of the USSR, which he tried to prevent.

However, both adherents and detractors tend to forget that many of the steps of the last Soviet leader were forced, and far from in all cases he could allow complete frankness. The ideas of “new thinking” cannot be perceived in isolation from the situation in which the Soviet Union needed access to Western loans, and irreconcilable ideological opponents are rarely agreed to lend. The beginning of economic restructuring looked more like an inevitability than a gesture of goodwill. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to distance himself from the forceful steps taken to suppress separatist movements in the Soviet republics were always not particularly convincing to anyone familiar with the decision-making system in the Soviet state. The same, perhaps, also applies to the events of August 1991, when the putsch of the security forces and the conservatives finally thwarted the signing of the renewed union treaty, which implied the preservation of a single state. The role of Mikhail Gorbachev, isolated for three days in a dacha in the Crimean Foros, but receiving a delegation of the organizers of the coup there, remains one of the main figures of silence: the Soviet president is considered more likely a victim of a conspiracy that deprived him of the remnants of influence and political prospects, and any questions about a possible Gorbachev consent to the solution of all issues by imposing a state of emergency are classified as bad taste. However, even a cursory acquaintance with chronology of events shows that his steps aimed at constructing or destroying personnel and political alliances were almost always forced and taken in conditions that left no alternatives. As a result, the Soviet leader consistently lost the support of conservatives from the Central Committee of the CPSU, reformers from his own circle and from among the first freely elected deputies of the congress and the Supreme Council, the leaders of the union republics and a large part of the security forces – these departments, after the failure of the GKChP, were also beheaded. After the denunciation of the Union Treaty of 1922 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, Mikhail Gorbachev had only to leave the Kremlin. On that December day, he recorded his last heartfelt televised address to the Soviet people – which, in essence, was no longer there, like tea in a cup into which the outgoing leader looked after finishing reading the text.

In late 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev became the first domestic leader in countless years to leave office before his death. He was the first to face the need to discuss with his successors the guarantees of his status after his resignation. Mikhail Gorbachev partially retained his privileges, including his dacha, transport and security, headed the fund in his name and for some time continued to actively participate in politics: he created or supported a number of social democratic projects, and in 1996 he ran for president, explaining to critics of the nomination that he has no other opportunity to publicly explain himself to voters. His political undertakings did not have much success; to maintain the life of the fund, he had to not only give lectures, but also star in advertising – for example, the Pizza Hut chain, which has now announced its withdrawal from Russia.

At the same time, like many retired politicians in the world, he managed, while maintaining a fairly high degree of publicity, to remain a private person, not without charm. In 1999, he faced a loss that seemed to be more painful than his own resignation: the death of his wife, Raisa Gorbacheva, whom he had met as a student. While “in office”, the last Soviet leader often faced criticism for, without exaggeration, the prominent role played by his “first lady” – this was extremely atypical for Soviet everyday life. The death of Raisa Maksimovna and the sincere grief of Mikhail Sergeevich, it seems, reconciled with her and with him many ill-wishers. “History is a capricious lady, and it’s hard to say what she will draw there. But I want to preempt her, to say that in general Gorbachev is a good guy, ”he said in 2011 in interview with Kommersant FM.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union was considered in the Russian political mainstream not so much as a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism and the market over a planned economy, but as a catastrophic event, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom public opinion steadily associates with the destruction of the USSR, it would seem, should have turned out to be completely marginal figure. This, however, did not happen – because he tirelessly publicly reminded that in 1991 his main political goal was not to retain power at all, but to save the Union, and because he sharply criticized Western leaders for overestimating their merit. in ending the Cold War and essentially refused to recognize Russia’s right to its own political interests. After the annexation of Crimea, Mikhail Gorbachev said that he himself would have acted in a similar way and did not do it at the time, only because Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea itself were part of one country.

Recent events, of course, could not but disappoint the author of the “new thinking” and the Nobel Prize winner. Peace Prizes 1990but until the end of his life, he had no doubt that the democratic reforms he initiated would ultimately have no reverse: “To defend the principles of democracy and the rule of law, to exclude any possibility of usurpation of power, adventurous actions – this should always be the concern of society and the state— spoke he was in August last year. “I believe that the democratic path of Russia’s development is the only correct one, that only on this path can our country develop and solve any problems.” Long before February 2022, the foreign policy situation had lost any resemblance to the period when Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues in the West were taking the first steps towards a new detente, but in this respect, the former Soviet leader did not lose optimism: “It will take political will to resume normal interaction, but there is no other way but dialogue,” Mikhail Gorbachev said in January 2021. In the same interview “RIA News” he also recalled his ideal of a nuclear-free world: “We need to agree on further reductions. It is necessary to discuss and correct military doctrines, moreover, in the direction of not being the first to use nuclear weapons, and not in the direction of lowering the threshold for their use, as is happening now … This is a very big agenda, very complex. If the United States and Russia really take it on, then they and everyone else will win.”

One can only hope that death, as is often the case with politicians, will give these statements of his more weight and loudness.

Ivan Sukhov