A good article today by Jeff Jacoby, about Gorbachev's complex life and legacy; not terribly new to those who followed the last years of the Soviet Union, but still well put. An excerpt:
Even if he could never bring himself to acknowledge the inherent evil of communism, it was to Gorbachev's lasting credit that when Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria chose to exit the Soviet orbit, he did not send in the tanks. That was the reason for all those prizes and awards, the reason he was so immensely popular in the West, the reason obituaries this past week have referred to him as a "liberator."
But he wasn't a liberator…. [C]hoosing not to commit mass murder or perpetuate slavery is not the same thing as choosing to save lives or free the enslaved.
And when it came to the former Soviet republics, Gorbachev's attitude was far less enlightened…. Gorbachev was not prepared to send tanks and troops to subdue Warsaw and Prague, but he had no such qualms—at least at first—closer to home [in the USSR's constituent "republics"].
"As early as 1986, nationalist protests in Almaty, Kazakhstan, were put down with a massive show of force," recalled Leonid Bershidsky in a Bloomberg essay. "In April 1991, the Soviet military killed 21 protesters and wounded hundreds more in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi…. People were killed as they protested in Dushanbe, Baku, and Riga," the capitals, respectively, of Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Latvia. In Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers moved directly into crowds of civilians demonstrating for freedom. Hundreds of protesters were wounded and at least 14 people — two of them teenagers — were killed.
Fortunately for the former Soviet republics, Gorbachev's tolerance for slaughter was low. He was too decent to successfully rule an evil empire.
For those who know Russian, here's a young Andrey Makarevich's "Give Lithuania Back to the Lithuanians," from 1991, which addresses Gorbachev directly; Makarevich is now a leading critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (see, e.g., here, though there are many other songs from him on this as well); here's a loose translation:
