Mikhail Gorbachev: a divisive figure loved abroad but loathed at home

Until his very last day, Mikhail Gorbachev lived in a dual reality — loved and celebrated in Washington, Paris and London, but reviled by large numbers of Russians who never forgave him for the turbulence that his reforms unleashed.

His policy of ‘glasnost’, or openness, gave Russians previously unthinkable levels of freedom, but for many, his rule will be remembered by the dramatic plunge in living standards that followed.

Others, haunted by Soviet nostalgia, saw Gorbachev as the destroyer of their empire and blame his policies for emboldening nationalists who successfully pushed for independence in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and elsewhere across the former Soviet bloc.

In a 2021 poll, more than 70 per cent of Russians said their country had moved in a negative direction during his rule, while he was previously ranked as the most unpopular Russian leader of the past century, a state-run pollster said.

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Gorbachev was never blind to the criticism, and while he always defended democratic credentials, he came to realise that many in the country were looking for a different type of leadership.

“A czar must conduct himself like a czar. And that I don’t know how to do,” he once said.

His relationship with Vladimir Putin always remained complicated. In an essay published in Time magazine in 2016, Gorbachev attacked Putin’s decision to run for a third presidency, calling his policies “an obstacle to progress”.

Putin in turn, famously referred to the end of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

On Tuesday night, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Russian leader deeply regretted the death of Gorbachev and would send a condolence telegram to the family in the morning.

Gorbachev will, however, be mourned among Russia’s increasingly suppressed liberal circles, many of whom have fled the country since the start of the war in Ukraine.

“Gorbachev is a monumental politician … there has never been such freedom in Russia as in the late 80s and early 90s. This is his merit,” wrote the veteran Russian journalist Mikhail Fishman, in one of many tributes that quickly started to pour in following the news of his death.

“We have all become orphans. But not everyone has understood it yet,” said Alexei Venediktov, a friend and the former head of the Ekho Moskvy radio station which was forced off air over its coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Gorbachev had himself helped kickstart independent Russian journalism, using part of his 1993 Nobel peace prize money to help set up the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a paper which went on to become the country’s most praised independent newspaper, shedding light on some of Russia’s darkest chapters. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta was also forced to cease its operations.

Few knew Gorbachev better than his biographer, William Taubman, who in 2017 wrote that Gorbachev’s main issue was that Russia simply had no real experience with the freedom it was being offered.

One of the last to visit Gorbachev in hospital on June 30th was the liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg.

“He gave us all freedom — but we don’t know what to do with it,” Grinberg said, after his visit to his old friend.