(CNN) — the tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev is that it survived the thaw of the Cold War between Moscow and the US, following doing more than anyone else to design it.
The last leader of the Soviet Union died on Tuesday at the age of 91with Washington and the Kremlin on opposite sides of President Vladimir Putin’s hot war in Ukraine, launched in part to avenge the Soviet collapse precipitated by the Gorbachev government.
It’s hard to sum up what Gorbachev meant to Western audiences in the 1980s, following one of the most dangerous periods of East-West confrontation. After generations of stern, hostile, hard-line, elderly Kremlin leaders, he was young, modern and fresh: a visionary and a reformer.
Gorbachev suddenly inspired hope that the nuclear confrontation that dogged the world in the second half of the 20th century would not ultimately destroy civilization. US President Ronald Reagan and his British soulmate, Margaret Thatcher, were the most aggressive cold warriors. But to their credit, they saw a promising moment, as the British prime minister said of the Soviet leader: “We can do business together.”
Former US President Ronald Reagan, left, and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, wearing cowboy hats at Reagan’s Ranch in the Sky in California.
Everyone remembers the day Reagan went to Berlin and, once morest the backdrop of the Brandenburg Gate, which had been marred by the ugly and inhumane concrete barrier between East and West, said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall”. It was one of the most iconic moments in modern American history. At the time, few people thought it was possible. In fact, some White House aides thought the comments were too provocative and tried to persuade Reagan not to say them. But in the end, in an act of great humanity, Gorbachev did indeed bring down that wall.
After a heady series of nuclear arms reduction talks and meetings with Western leaders, Gorbachev became a hero in the West. But it was his decision not to intervene with military force when popular rebellions once morest communist regimes broke out in the Warsaw Pact nations in 1989 that led to the liberation of Eastern Europe, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany.
That burst of freedom bequeathed 30 years of relative peace in Europe.
Exalted in the West, an outcast at home
But while he was exalted in the West, Gorbachev came to be seen as an outcast at home. He often forgets now that his goal was not necessarily to dismantle the communist Soviet Union. In many ways, his hand was forced by decades of economic decline in the communist system and the crippling impact of a nuclear arms race with the West.
But in trying to save the system, he unleashed forces that destroyed it. Far from heralding the “end of history,” as was often claimed at the time, his influence caused consequences that might still be felt on the day of his death, with Moscow and the West once once more clashing in a Cold War-style shiver. .
At home, Gorbachev had two general ideas, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, brought to splinters by perestroika, brought dire economic conditions, disorder, and a blow to national pride. All of this added up to the circumstances that eventually made a strongman like Putin attractive to many Russians.
Putin speaks with Gorbachev on December 21, 2004.
At the time Gorbachev refused to send the Red Army to Eastern Europe to save the communist bloc, Putin was stationed with the KGB in East Germany and felt the sting of Moscow’s defection. He came to see the demise of the Soviet Empire as a disaster in history; and once Putin came to power, he set regarding restoring wounded Russian national prestige.
Now the world is saddled with a leader in the Kremlin, who, unlike Gorbachev, is ready to remake the map of Europe by force, even if the restoration of the Warsaw Pact is out of his reach, with millions in Eastern Europe now effectively living Gorbachev’s legacy in free and democratic societies.
Gorbachev’s government was not without flaws from a Western point of view. He sent tanks to Lithuania to crush hopes of independence in the Baltic states in 1991, months before he left power. And he was expelled from Ukraine for five years following saying that he supported Putin’s annexation of Crimea.
But to the end of his days, Gorbachev condemned Putin’s excesses and traveled the world warning of the danger of falling relations between the world’s two leading nuclear powers. That he is remembered as a giant in the West and an outcast at home speaks to the abyss of understanding and experience that once once more poisons relations between East and West.
Gorbachev never stopped mourning his beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. Now, he has followed her and her contemporaries since an extraordinary moment in history — Reagan, Thatcher, George Bush, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François. Mitterrand — to the grave.
Everywhere, except in Russia, he will be remembered as one of those rare figures in history, who by character and vision really changed the world.
