The death this week of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who presided over its disintegration at the end of the 1980s, prompted an avalanche of tributes. These came mainly from outside Russia – where he was viewed with considerable ambivalence by much of the population who blame him for the mess they find themselves in. His reputation was also tarnished in a number of former Soviet satellites, where he used troops to put down nationalist demonstrations with considerable loss of life.
But he was a darling of the west, which saw him as the “man who ended the cold war” and feted him for opening up Soviet society and encouraging pluralism. But the truth is more nuanced – isn’t it always? Alexander Titov, an expert in Russian politics at the Queen’s University Belfast, who grew up in the USSR and professes himself to be a beneficiary of Gorbachev’s campaigns of perestroika and glasnost, writes that by the former Soviet leader’s own lights, he failed at what he had planned to do. Far from revitalising the Soviet Union, glasnost precipitated the collapse of the USSR, writes Titov, while perestroika – Gorbechev’s plan to restructure the Soviet economy, paved the way for the rise of the kleptocracy.
