Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, whose legacy is contested to this day in Russia, passed away on Tuesday. No other details were given apart from that Gorbachev died after a long illness.
Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia. Both his grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned for allegedly anti-Soviet activities under the iron hand of Josef Stalin. He fought against the Germans who occupied his village, winning the Red Banner of Labor, a rare honour for a 17-year-old. He was educated at the country's top university, Moscow State.
Gorbachev's historical importance
On the one hand, he won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War and spent his later years collecting accolades and awards from all corners of the world.
Yet, he was widely despised at home. Soon after taking power, Gorbachev began a campaign to end his country's economic and political stagnation, using glasnost or openness, to help achieve his goal of perestroika or restructuring. Though in power for less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, and the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination.
His decline was humiliating. His power was sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, and the Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion before his eyes.
Gorbachev and George Bush Sr famously declared an end to the Cold War at the Malta Summit in December 1989, weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Bush declaring support for Gorbachev's perestroika. In 1991, Gorbachev and Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty, known as START I, committing the two superpowers to cut their stockpiles of long-range nuclear weapons. It was the first agreement to call for deep reductions of US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons.
As far as the crash of the Soviet Union went, there were a lot of big leaders who could be questioned. Lenin, for laying faulty foundations? Stalin, for his excesses while making it a superpower? Khrushchev, for his impetuous decisions? Brezhnev, for stagnation? Or Gorbachev with his unsuccessful reforms? As the last leader of the Soviet Union, after the brief stints of Andropov (who sought to start addressing the problems) and Chernenko, Gorbachev still attracts the maximum praise—and blame—for his actions and their results. How justified is it? What could he have done, done differently, or not done? Should he acted more firmly against the hardliners, backed the liberals more strongly, including not having that famous falling-out with Boris Yeltsin that made the latter an implacable enemy?
"The world is deeply divided when it comes to understanding Gorbachev. Many, especially in the West, regard him as the greatest statesman of the second half of the twentieth century. In Russia, however, he is widely despised by those who blame him for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic crash that accompanied it," William Taubman, the Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Amherst College and a Slavic studies and Cold War history expert, had written in his book Gorbachev.
His present significance
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was elbowed out and NATO became the key player in defining the contours of European security. The process was gradual, but painful, an America brushed away feeble protests by Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin and imposed its will on Russia.
Putin always blamed the fall of Soviet Union for NATO's duplicitous behaviour and expansionism in Europe. He recently wrote that the Soviet Union was forced into signing a non-aggression agreement with Germany before the Second World War—the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—after Western powers cold-shouldered creating a military alliance. The Soviet Union did its utmost to use every chance of creating an anti-Hitler coalition. "Despite I will say it again the double-dealing on the part of the Western countries," he wrote.
