The Kremlin has been unsure how to mark the death this week of Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who is celebrated without hesitation in the west for his role in hastening the end of the cold war. In Russia, events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union are officially narrated as a national calamity, or not at all. The loss of superpower status is an injury that Vladimir Putin has made it his life’s work to reverse.
Mr Gorbachev did not intend for his democratising reforms to dissolve the USSR. In some former Soviet republics he is remembered more as a repressor of pro-independence movements than as a liberator. Events ran away from him. The Russia that was born from Soviet ruin was not a creature of his design, and the failure of its subsequent experiment in political freedom tainted his legacy. For many Russians, chaos and criminality contaminated the concept of democracy. Mr Putin capitalised on that disillusionment to restore authoritarianism with a neo-Soviet, nationalist inflection, of which his murderous assault on Ukraine is an expression.
Mr Putin is a product of KGB training made doubly cynical by post-communist kleptocracy. The self-serving lens he applies to perestroika and glasnost – Mr Gorbachev’s policies of economic and political openness – is not a view that needs any sympathy from the outside. For all the subsequent disappointments and misjudgments, the ambitions of east-west reconciliation for which Mr Gorbachev was lauded overseas, and the glimpse of a brighter future that he gave to a generation, are moral accomplishments that stand the test of time.
The contrast with the present Kremlin incumbent could not be more stark. Mr Putin does not merely reject democracy for fear that an empowered populace might remove him from office. That would be a pragmatic kind of despotism, despicable but amenable to diplomatic containment. Even before Mr Gorbachev, there was scope for strategic dialogue between western leaders and their Soviet counterparts. Relations were frosty, but rational.
Mr Putin despises political liberalism with a quasi-religious fervour and views the outside world with paranoid spite. He is not, to flip Margaret Thatcher’s assessment of Mr Gorbachev, a man with whom business can be done, although nor can he safely be ignored.
That is a problem for western policymakers and a source of economic pain for democracies that were for too long complacent about the character of the Russian state. The decision this week by Gazprom, Russia’s state energy company, to shut down its main Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe is a reminder that the Kremlin’s military aggression against Ukraine has a second front – a war of economic attrition against everyone who stands in solidarity with Kyiv.
There is also a home front – the systematic grinding away of what little civil society, political freedom and media independence was left in Russia from the efflorescence of those things in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Sadly, all too many Russians are in full thrall to the Putin cult, but a minority see its true nature. Some remember the reality of Soviet repression. They don’t share their president’s nostalgia for it. Some were too young to remember the advent of freedom in 1991, but wish it would dawn again. In them resides a hope that the idea of a democratic Russia is not buried with Mikhail Gorbachev.
