In 2005 that curious and wise guy who was Eric Hobsbawm shared with Mikhail Gorbachev in Turin a meeting of prominent retirees. A majority of former high-ranking officials mixed with some academics like him, who luckily wrote his impressions: “If the historian in me was slightly disappointed, the Mikhail Gorbachev fan was not. Was he a great man? I do not know. I doubt it. He was – still is – a caring and upright man whose actions had enormous consequences, for better and for worse. Being his contemporary is a privilege. Humanity is indebted to him. And at the same time, if I were Russian, I would also think of him as the man who brought his country to ruin.”
For Hobsbawm, Gorbachev’s merit was preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union from turning into a bloodbath, as happened later in Yugoslaviaor perhaps worse if one takes into account the already formidable atomic might of East and West.
As for the downfall, it undoubtedly refers to the implosion of the Soviet Union, which following losing the Cold War with the United States went from the category of superpower to that of a country whose nuclear warheads did not disguise the dissolution of a State.
It can never be affirmed, in history, that an event was inevitable. But the data on Soviet decline is there. When Gorbachev took over the leadership of the Communist Party in 1985, the Soviet economy already depended on oil and gas exports, not industrial products. At the same time, Moscow was losing the strength and flexibility necessary to face challenges as enormous and diverse as the massification of technological development, the maintenance of centrality over nationalities and the conservation of authority and influence over other socialist countries such as Germany. East, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1989, overwhelmed by the popular leadership of Lech Walesa, who also received the double support of the United States and the Vatican under John Paul II, the Polish communist government granted free elections and lost them. It was in June. In November the Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. And two years later the Soviet Union consummated its collapse.
Surrender
Since thenGorbachev was the symbol of surrender for a range that goes from Russian nationalists to exponents of the hardest left, from Russia and the rest of the world, and even non-pro-Soviet national-popular sectors but convinced, yes, that for underdeveloped countries the world was better with two superpowers compensating each other than with a hyperpower worthy of the Roman Empire like the United States without the USSR. The criticism was summed up (is summed up) in one sentence: “Gorbachev should have done like the Chinese, who modernized without exploiting.”
There are two problems. One, that Gorbachev did not want to be China. He had already chosen the combined path of perestroika (reform) and glasnost (political liberalization), and not just the former. The other problem must be posed as a question, and since it is a counterfactual, it serves to play but does not have a serious answer: if Gorbachev had looked for it, might the USSR have been another China? Or was it too late for reforms because it had already lost the technological, economic and aspirational race with Washington? The Italian communists, good Sovietologists, were always convinced that the great opportunity for managed reform had been the brief tenure of Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief who was general secretary of the CP from November 1982 to February ’84, when he died.
The truth is in 1991 the Russians, although satisfied with the stability and the modest welfare state of the USSR, had already spent a year queuing for miles at the first McDonald’s in Moscow on Pushkinskaia Square. Hobsbawm would say: for better and for worse.
