The last president of the USSR and father of ‘perestroika’, Mikhail Gorbachev, died this Tuesday in Moscow at the age of 91 after “a long and serious illness”, as confirmed by the Central Clinical Hospital to the RIA Nóvosti agency. Gorbachev will be buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in the Russian capital.
The end of history that the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed to refer to the changes of the 1980s would have to be found elsewhere without the incomparable figure of the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.
The USSR entered this decisive stage at the hands of three genuine representatives of the communist old guard, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernienko. The rapid disappearance of the latter two brought to the pinnacle of power a communist leader of a new generation, who had been promoted from his homeland in the Stavropol region thanks to his capacity for dialogue and empathy, something that they were little aware of. accustomed who continued to prefer methods inherited from the Stalin era.
Mikhail Gorbachev, from a Russian-Ukrainian peasant family in southern Russia, was mentored by Andropov and Mikhail Suslov, the party’s ideologue and guardian of communist orthodoxy, and many believed then that they would be able to control him.
But the new general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR preferred negotiation and understanding to isolation and brute force. Build bridges with the West rather than wall off and send in tanks. Gorbachev managed to come to an understanding with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, which ended up creating favorable circumstances so that the world as it was known then changed completely, the cold war ended and, as Fukuyama said, a new reality was born. He also had an understanding with Helmut Kohl, which facilitated the subsequent unification of Germany.
Inside, Gorbachev has left two terms that will go down in history attached to his figure: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (change, economic reform). In one of his interviews, Gorbachev himself assured that at that time the atmosphere created by Stalin had not yet dissipated. “We said directly: ‘Our people are free to say what they think, free to write, to meet and to discuss.’ Glasnost meant that the whole of society got going.”
Today the man who launched the reforms that ended the cold war, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, is an almost forgotten character in the public life of his country. It is true that a good part of the population blames him for the difficulties that occurred in the 90s, and the nostalgic continue to dream of the Soviet empire. But it is more true that the following Russian leaders have kept him in the background.
He himself was aware of this, as is intuited in an anecdote he tells in his book I’m still an optimist, from 2017. At the end of the 20th century, he meets Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the richest man in Russia and owner of the oil company Yukos, who asks: “Mr. Gorbachev, do you remember me?” To which the last leader of the USSR replied: “Sure, I remember you. But do you remember me?”
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in Privolnoye (Stavropol Krai). His father, Sergei, earned his living driving a combine harvester. His mother, Maria, worked on a collective farm. As a teenager, he put himself at the controls of a tractor to help his family financially. But his future was in studies. Encouraged by his father, he went on to enter Moscow State University (MGU). In the capital of the country he achieved two things that accompanied him to his homeland, each more valuable: a cum laude degree in Law and his wife, Raísa.
Parallel to his university career, the young Gorbachev developed an active and recognized political activity. Before his studies he was already involved in the Young Communist League in Stavropol. During his studies, he definitively joined the Communist Party and when he came back to earth this weighed more than the job he got in the Prosecutor’s Office.
From the propaganda apparatus of the Party, he worked his way up the Soviet ladder. In 1956 he became the first secretary of the Stavropol Komsomol Committee. In 1961 he was appointed a delegate to the Party Congress. His knowledge of two key subjects in his region, agriculture and economy, his gift for people and organization, allowed him to become the regional communist chief.
Two decades later, when an aging Brezhnev was still running the USSR, he became a member of the Politburo (1980). In his fifties, he was actually a youngster compared to most Soviet leaders. Upon Chernienko’s death in 1985, he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, inheriting another moment of tension with the West: Moscow’s intervention in Afghanistan and the arms race with Reagan proposing to place weapons in space.
To this were added the economic problems in the interior. Gorbachev set out to make reforms with the intention of improving the lives of his people. He introduced glasnost and perestoika.
Contacts with Western leaders were quite fruitful. He is recognized for a fundamental role in the fall of the Berlin Wall and in agreements such as the Intermediate Nuclear Weapons Reduction Pact (INF), which he signed with Reagan in 1987. These were events that brought the world closer to the end of the Cold War. .
The Chernobyl disaster and the Soviet government’s slow response overshadowed those advances. But politically, the reforms continued, such as the creation of the first democratic parliament in the USSR. Other gestures, such as the return of the dissident Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, also marked that time.
The opening also had unforeseen consequences. Pressures from all sides ended up breaking the seams of perestroika. “Thanks to the fact that it was a reality, and despite the fact that it was interrupted, it gave a push that set in motion not only our country, but the whole world,” said the optimistic Gorbachev in 2017 at the presentation of the memoir of the.
After the eastern countries were freeing themselves from the shackles of Moscow, a new anti-Gorbachev political leader emerged in Russia, Boris Yeltsin, and the desire for freedom awoke in the other Soviet republics. Lithuania started it in 1990 and, with a dropper, all the others followed.
Perhaps the last months of the USSR were the worst for one of the most emblematic characters of the 20th century. In August 1991, a group of conservative communists, including Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and USSR Vice President Gennadi Yanayev, held Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha, where he was vacationing, and attempted a coup. One of the consequences was the strengthening of the figure of Yeltsin.
Before the end of the year, Gorbachev was missing when the regional leaders of Russia (Yeltsin), Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk) and Belarus (Stanislav Shushkévich), signed the Treaty of Belabezha in December 1991. It was the end of the USSR and the beginning of a new story.
