The farewell of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has been expeditious, as was his resignation from his position at the end of 1991. After appearing on television to announce his resignation, he received a call from his wife, convalescing from a stroke. Upset, Raísa informed him that some officials had planted themselves in the official residence to throw them out. The tricolor flag was already flying to replace the red one with the hammer and sickle. Yeltsin, who had taken advantage of Gorbachev’s reforms to depose him, did not even grant them the Christmas period, as a courtesy gesture, for the move. The next day the USSR was officially dissolved.
A communist, an outright optimist and self-confident (perhaps too much), the father of perestroika had believed in the possibility of reviving a patient with obvious symptoms of septicemia -a diagnosis known to all, including his supporter, Yuri Andropov-, but it would be up to him to wean him off the ventilator. Gorbachev became the opposite of the heroes of socialist realist novels, as he went down in history as a resounding failure. A singular failure, moreover, since it inaugurated a period of three decades of nuclear peace. He also released the past that had been hijacked from the Soviets. If I had to choose a word to synthesize the role played by the much-loved and reviled Gorbi – paragon of contradictions, good intentions, misfortunes, unfortunate decisions and unforeseen achievements – it would be the Greek phármakon: remedy, poison and scapegoat at the same time.
Like Putin, Gorbachev believed that Russia deserved its place as a great power in the world order, with its own zone of influence, although each claimed it in their own way: if the former began his presidency with a war in Chechnya, the latter did with the cessation of the Afghan bloodletting; if the youngest turned the elections into a farce, the veteran sponsored the freest known to date. Challenge, brute force and secrecy against openness, negotiation and proximity.
Under Putin’s mandate there have been, and are, more political prisoners than there were under Gorbachev. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was a textbook apparatchik, but a believer among cynics. A promoter of perestroika and glasnost –concepts inspired by the utopian socialism of Alexander Herzen, not substitutes for “democracy” or “truth”, as has been pointed out–, Gorbachev presented his project to the Party and gave relevance to the human factor (chelovécheski factor). That very thing, in the eyes of the hardliners, is what would make it weak against the West. The KGB officer stationed in Dresden Vladimir Putin never forgave him that, when he contacted Moscow one night in December 1989 and requested reinforcements to dissolve the protesters concentrated in front of his headquarters, elated by the fall of the Wall, he received silence in response. . “We lost confidence only for an instant, but it was enough to upset the balance of forces around the world,” Putin stressed in his February 24 speech. Never again should the “paralysis of power” be repeated, something that Beijing also took note of. With the recent loss of the news license of the Russian independent media Nóvaya Gazeta, the sentence of 22 years in prison to a journalist for treason and the energy blackmail of the European Union, Putin has driven the nails in his coffin.
Few political figures have aroused such disparate opinions after their death both inside and outside their country. Gorbachev removed the shackle from the nations that formed the Warsaw Pact. He let Eastern Europe go, that “suitcase without a handle”, according to the writer Tatiana Tolstaia: difficult to carry, but a pity to leave it. It was too heavy a burden and, instead, Gorbachev reacted in the old way, as a worthy son of that system, with Baltic and Caucasian nationalism. The Chernobyl disaster, moreover, had exposed the most miserable inertia of the regime.
I read in the memoirs of his interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, that he was an unheard-of example of a leader, capable of being fascinated by people and places. After a summit with Reagan, in 1987, he told him: “A great day. We were enemy countries for too long. And that’s why a lot of bad things happened… We also bear a large part of the blame.” Both Gorbachev and Putin looked to the past: the first to turn the page, the second to get stuck in it.
