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.
