The first and last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, died in Moscow on Tuesday at the age of 91. The Germans loved their “Gorbi”. The Soviet leader did not stand in the way of reunification. In Russia, Gorbachev was quickly seen as the Soviet Union’s gravedigger, a pioneer of painful economic reforms, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the human misery of the transition period.
In the public consciousness, Gorbachev’s big catchphrases of the 1980s, glanost – openness – and perestroika – restructuring – merge with Boris Yeltsin’s reforms of the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. According to polls, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who were enemies of the Soviet Union in the last few years, are Russia’s least popular historical heads of state – and “reform” is still a dirty word from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
Anyone who tackles their country’s long-buried problems can rarely assure themselves of the love of their compatriots. The Soviet Union was economically dead, the shelves were empty, nobody believed in socialist ideology anymore. Nevertheless, Gorbachev insisted on socialism and the preservation of the USSR.
In doing so, Gorbachev obviously applied different standards than during German reunification. He tried to suppress ethnic conflicts and national independence efforts in the Soviet republics by force, ignoring others until they exploded. This makes Gorbachev a controversial figure in many successor states to the Soviet empire, such as Georgia and Lithuania.
In Tbilisi, in April 1989, the Soviet army violently broke up a pro-independence demonstration for Georgia. 20 people, mostly women, died and hundreds of other demonstrators were injured. It was similar in Vilnius. The then Soviet Republic of Lithuania declared itself an independent state in 1990. Gorbachev first tried it in the spirit of glasnost and perestroika with open letters in Pravda.
But the Lithuanians were adamant. Gorbachev then imposed an economic blockade. In January 1991, Gorbachev, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few months earlier, had Soviet special forces invade Vilnius, shooting dead demonstrators and injuring hundreds. Gorbachev only gave in after pressure from the West.
In the end, Gorbachev was a politician who vigorously defended his vision of Moscow’s supremacy. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea eight years ago, Gorbachev spoke of the peninsula’s “return” to Russia as “fortunate”. He considered the referendum forced by Moscow on accession to Russia to be legitimate, and he called the covert presence of the Russian military, which Vladimir Putin later admitted, “nonsense”.
In an interview a few days after the annexation, he spoke of the “free decision” of the people, which stands above everything else. Despite his occasional criticism of Putin for his undemocratic tendencies, Gorbachev believed he was “consistently representing Russia’s interests in the world.” The former Soviet head of state did not comment publicly on the new Russian invasion of Ukraine in February.
Gorbachev was a contradictory, tragic figure. Opinions about what was right and wrong about his policies will probably continue to differ in the future. In his home country and in the post-Soviet region, Gorbachev cannot become a consensus figure who, like in Germany, is only viewed positively.
