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Gorbachev could not control the forces he unleashed

He had no choice but to try to reform the Soviet Union but he was naive, particularly in imagining nationalism was no longer an issue

As he sipped Guinness in Dublin 20 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev was basking in adulation. There to receive the freedom of Dublin city and an honorary degree from Trinity College, it was part of a long tour that had resulted in 26 international awards. The esteem in which he was held was reflected in the peroration that preceded his award in TCD: “An honourable patriot and a humane and magnanimous citizen of the world.”

Gorbachev spoke of his pleasure at being in a country where he was lauded, in stark contrast to the dislike of him in Russia; six years previously, he had been humiliated when he stood for election as president of the Russian Federation, receiving just 0.5% of the vote. Gorbachev acknowledged he had made mistakes, especially in relation to the timing of his reforms in the 1980s. Given the speed and scale of what happened when he was in power, historians are inevitably divided on his legacy. Paradoxes pervaded his leadership, with thoughts of “managed pluralism” or “socialist market” reforms suggesting a strong appetite for change but not a desire to dismantle completely the core of the system he inherited.

To control the reforms that had exposed many contradictions was an impossible task and he acknowledged his failure to keep “the entire process of perestroika within the framework of my intentions”. As many historians would see it, those intentions and the framework were not compatible. Most accept that 1989 was the crucial turning point; the decision not to intervene to preserve communist regimes in eastern Europe changed everything and made German reunification possible.

But it was not as simple as that; Gorbachev’s aversion to force in 1989 was genuine but it was also about what was feasible. True, intervention was not consistent with his much-vaunted emphasis on a “common European home” which demanded an end to cold war blocs, and his self-described “moral” stance on reducing the nuclear threat. But neither could the Soviet Union afford to intervene and keep eastern Europe afloat financially.

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As historian Tony Judt put it: “Gorbachev, like everyone else in 1990, was flying blind... but the Soviet leader, unlike his western counterparts, had no good options” except to demand financial compensation for German reunification as the Soviet empire crumbled. Both sides to the cold war had very different ideas as to what its end meant: “we can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat”, US president George Bush told German chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990 in relation to Gorbachev’s desire to see Nato ultimately become redundant.

Gorbachev was irked at Bush’s arrogant assumption of a monopoly of virtue in celebrating the end of Soviet influence while insisting on America’s right to interventionism where it saw fit. But Gorbachev, given the crushing economic difficulties and nationalist tensions domestically, was not in a strong position to pursue his vision of the Soviet Union as a serious post cold war European power; nor could he control the momentum in eastern and central Europe.

A narrative of his failures is thus easy to construct, hanging over it all the famous words of Alexis de Tocqueville in L’Ancien régime (1856): “the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.” But William Taubman’s exhaustive 2017 biography is much more generous: “By introducing free elections and creating parliamentary institutions, he laid the groundwork for democracy. It is more the fault of the raw material he worked with than of his own real shortcomings and mistakes that Russian democracy will take much longer to build than he thought.”

Juggling act

Is that too generous? Certainly, through the prism of Putin’s Russia and recent events, it seems wildly so. It might prompt some to wonder why Gorbachev did not engineer a slower transition, but that too is naive given the extent of his juggling act. Gorbachev spoke of the necessity of the reforms he undertook because the alternative was “the system that held everyone in its grip, stifling initiative. In order to protect itself, it suppressed both freedom of thought and any kind of searching explanation.” It took a remarkable politician to challenge that system, but he also vastly underestimated what lifting the lid would do to a variety of nationalisms, naively telling his party in 1987: “We can truly say that for our country the nationalities issue has been resolved.”

When he was in Dublin in 2002, Gorbachev was cautious in speaking about the presidency of Putin, asking his audience to appreciate that Putin had inherited chaos and “understand the problems he is facing”. But as has been horribly apparent for years now, and especially in the past six months, the messianic mission of Putin is to restore the Soviet empire, because its loss, presided over by Gorbachev was, Putin insists “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century”. Putin’s messianism will forever stalk the Gorbachev legacy.