Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died yesterday at age 91, was neither the great, visionary emancipator the liberal intelligentsia pretends he was nor a hapless dupe of inevitable historical forces.
Despite the gushing by much of American media, Gorbachev was not the driver of freedom for Eastern Europe. President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, aided mightily by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and others, drove that process.
On the other hand, almost nobody else among the Soviet high command, with the possible exception of Gorbachev’s hand-picked protege Eduard Shevardnadze, could or would have allowed the dissolution of the Soviet empire and eventually the Soviet Union itself without massive bloodshed. Gorbachev could be ruthless and was certainly no saint, but in the end, he possessed innate humaneness that both Thatcher and Reagan recognized and appreciated.
The record shows that Gorbachev genuinely believed in greater openness and “restructuring reforms” — communist state control, but without the brutal oppression. He really did want a better life for his people; his “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” reforms weren’t mere desperate measures to save the system but ideas he had spent his entire bureaucratic career developing and perfecting. Still, his stultifying Marxist ideology kept him from realizing that a better life was impossible under any form of communist rule.
To his credit, Gorbachev seemed sincere in his desire to avoid major warfare. Reagan wasn’t wrong when he eventually wrote in his diary that “a certain chemistry does exist between us.” This was not some naive faith of Reagan’s; it was a shrewd judgment, shared by Thatcher, that after several years of interaction, he had taken Gorbachev’s measure and had observed a sort of essential decency.
Granted, it took Reagan’s remarkable combination of toughness and personal charm, through contentious years of negotiation and salesmanship for freedom, to prevail upon the better angels of Gorbachev’s complicated nature. Reagan, not Gorbachev, was the hero of freedom’s triumph in the Cold War.
Still, despite those of us hard-line conservatives who seriously doubted in, say, 1987 that Gorbachev at heart was different from other Soviet leaders, Reagan’s gradual growth in trusting his geopolitical rival was the more astute assessment. In the end, to Gorbachev’s credit, Gorby’s desire for peace outstripped his desire for power.
Had Gorbachev’s predecessors, Yuri Andropov or Konstantin Chernenko, been younger and healthier, they surely would not have allowed the Berlin Wall to fall and Eastern bloc nations to leave Moscow’s orbit without a major conflagration. And although Gorbachev clearly did not intend or desire the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he certainly made clear in later years that what he and Reagan achieved was worth the price.
After Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Gorbachev’s foundation released a statement calling for negotiations rather than warfare. “There is nothing more precious in the world than human lives,” read the statement.
Because Gorbachev took power when he did, an untold number of lives were saved from destruction, and hundreds of millions lived in a freedom they would not have otherwise enjoyed. That’s quite a legacy for a geopolitical loser devoted to a rotten ideology. Gorbachev’s life teaches us that humanity can trump ideology if, under pressure, we make the right choice.
