Youngsoo Kim is a professor at Yeungnam University, Department of Political Science and International Relations.
The funeral of former Soviet President Gorbachev was held in Moscow on the 3rd. 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief led the carriage with a portrait of Gorbachev. Putin did not attend the funeral. These funeral scenes are not the product of chance, and modern history of Russia is condensed. Gorbachev and Putin represent the two most powerful and antagonistic alternatives in Russia today.
“A ghost roams Europe. The ghost of communism.” This is the beginning of Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto. It was the intellectuals who were passionate regarding communism more than anyone. It is because of the utopia of a classless society. Intellectuals live on ideals rather than reality. But communism is a kind of horizon. Brezhnev spoke enthusiastically regarding the bright future of communism. an old man said “It was a wonderful speech. I hope even old men like us can see the coming of communism. Let me ask you one question. You said, ‘The dawn of communism is already beginning over the horizon.’ What exactly is a horizon?” “It is an imaginary line where the sky and the earth meet. But the horizon keeps receding back when a person approaches.” the old man murmured. “Now I know what you mean.”
Communism, which was initially the gospel of liberation, ended in disaster, and is a disaster that has not yet ended. In the 70 years since the 1917 revolution, more than 40 million people were killed in the Soviet Union. Thirteen million died in the process of agricultural collectivization, 8 million in civil wars, and more than 20 million under Stalin’s oppression. More importantly, freedom was completely destroyed. The reality of communism was totalitarianism. One person thinks everything for the whole, the other stops thinking. In the Soviet Union, ‘thinking’ was a crime. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in a concentration camp and Sakharov in a psychiatric hospital.
It was Gorbachev who put a dagger in the chest of this Stalinist regime. Gorbachev’s hometown is Stavropol Privolslav. It is located in the vast steppe of Kazakhstan, stretching in the Caucasus Mountains and the lower Volga River. As a child, his grandfather was marked as a kulak (rich farmer) and left the Siberian breed. His maternal grandfather was treated as a Trotskyist and severely tortured. A life of persecution and poverty has long been the fate of Russian peasants. The situation did not change when the Communist Party came to power instead of the Tsar.
Gorbachev, who came from a poor peasant background, but was intelligent, went to Moscow University. At that time, he already understood that “the life of a peasant was practically a slave’s life. The tax policy was, in a word, extortion. The Stalin regime treated the peasants like serfs.” It was not a theory, but a first-hand experience in his hometown. In 1979, Politburo Shevardnadze criticized Gorbachev for saying the Soviet Union was “rotten from top to bottom”. Gorbachev also agreed, “I think so.”
Upon becoming supreme leader in 1985, Gorbachev embarked on radical reforms known as perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness). The ultimate goal was to dismantle the Stalin regime. But in the end it failed. Once liberalization began, reform quickly turned into a torrent. The Soviet state itself was torn apart, and it fell from the world’s most powerful power.
Russia is now wandering between Putin, Gorbachev and Sakharov. Putin is an alter ego of Stalin. The Stalin regime has been deeply ingrained in the hearts of the Russians. In 1989, when the perestroika was well underway, 40% of Russians aspired to a revival of a leader with a ‘strong hand’. Nationalists accuse Gorbachev of dumping his country in the mud. Stalin is still a living myth. So did the invasion of Ukraine.
Gorbachev was an eternal Leninist. Lenin acknowledged the failure of the Bolsheviks and listened to the opinions of the opposition. He believed in a future of socialism with a human face. But Gorbachev’s biggest mistake was ‘trying to do better socialism’. So Sakharov, a nuclear physicist and Russian conscience, said shortly before his death: “Gorbachev is a paradox for me.” He did not believe in socialism. Humans love the unattainable. That paradoxically leads to human tragedy. Communism is one such example. Nevertheless, some of the 586 in our society still want to remove ‘freedom’ from liberal democracy.
