Mikhail Gorbachev lived long enough to see everything he had tried to achieve crumble or get blown up.
The era of detente and arms control between Washington and Moscow has been replaced by a bloody war in Ukraine in which US and Nato weaponry is being pitted against Russian forces with the accompanying risk of a direct clash between the nuclear superpowers by accident or miscalculation.
By the time Gorbachev stepped down at the end of 1991, the Nato-Soviet frontier was no longer a flashpoint. Nato pulled all but a few thousand troops back from the eastern flank, and the terrors of the cold war seemed consigned to history books and museums. In the wake of the Ukraine invasion in February, Nato has rushed troops eastwards, mobilising 40,000 troops under its direct command, with plans to put 300,000 on high alert.
Gorbachev, who was turning 91 and already in poor health when the invasion began, issued a statement through his foundation in the days after Russia’s all-out offensive calling for “an early cessation of hostilities and immediate start of peace negotiations”.
“There is nothing more precious in the world than human lives,” the statement said.
A journalist who had remained close to Gorbachev said in July that the former Soviet leader was “upset” by what he saw.
“Gorbachev’s reforms – political, not economic – were all destroyed,” the journalist Alexei Venediktov, the editor of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, told the Russian Forbes magazine. “Nilch, zero, ashes.”
Gorbachev’s former interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, who works for the Gorbachev Centre thinktank, told Fox News two days before the invasion: “He always warned things could happen that could be very dangerous between Russia and Ukraine, but he always did what he could in order to bring those two nations closer together rather than see a continuation of this rift that we now see widening. So for him, emotionally, it is very tragic.”
Gorbachev was a champion of arms control and even discussed the potential elimination of nuclear weapons with Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavik summit in 1986. Now, the last remaining agreement between US and Russia limiting nuclear weapons is being corroded by Russia’s suspension of mutual inspections. Both countries are modernising their arsenals and Putin has made a point of threatening nuclear use. This year, the number of nuclear warheads around the world will rise for the first time since the cold war.
Gorbachev hoped to fundamentally change the mindset of a country that had never experienced democracy, having gone straight from Romanov to Bolshevik dictatorships. The last days of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) policy were more conducive to freedom of expression than Putin’s Russia where any hint of criticism can bring a jail term.
People have been imprisoned for ironically holding up a blank piece of card. Venediktov’s radio station Ekho Moskvy was closed down and the Jewish journalist found a pig’s head and antisemitic abuse left outside his door.
Gorbachev closed down the gulags; Putin’s leading opponent, Alexei Navalny, having survived poisoning, is currently languishing in a penal colony where he has been put in solitary confinement for the third time in a month.
Gorbachev was increasingly careful about what he said about Putin in public, and praised him for consolidating the Russian state after the chaos under Boris Yeltsin. But in 2011, he had a warning for what was to come.
“It’s perhaps understandable that during the initial phase he used certain authoritarian methods in his leadership, but using authoritarian methods as a policy for the future – that I think is wrong. I think that’s a mistake,” he said at a public event in the US.
“Wherever you go … you see that where you have leaders that rule for 20 years or more … the only thing that is important in such situations for those leaders and people around them is holding on to power,” he said. “I believe that this is something that is happening now in our country.”
