At 91 years old, Mikhail Gorbachev died, the last president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the former Soviet Union that preceded the Russian Federation and other subsequently independent nations, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. His death was confirmed by Russia Today.

It changed what would never change: the Russian revolution of Marx and Lenin.

The storm unleashed by the winds he sowed, wiped the legendary Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the map, demolished the shameful Berlin Wall and shook the untouchable of the Communist Party to its foundations; furthermore, the fury of the storm dragged him from power and transformed him into an affable lecturer who earned thousands of dollars and euros by preaching the virtues of moderate transformations throughout Europe and the world.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was what the Soviets always hated: a reformer. So he once said he wanted to be remembered; but yes, as a “profound reformer”, if such a thing exists. He lived a time that he seemed to understand, but in an unstable and chimerical country that seems not to have understood it. His fate, chiseled for the glories of the Kremlin, was overshadowed by the turmoil of a nation founded on epic and blood, enterprise and excess, Cossack spirit and Tolstoian impetus. In mother Russia, if you are not Ivan the Terrible, you must at least be Tchaikovsky.

Gorbachev was Gorbachev. Thoughtless and brave in going through a process of real estate reform, unable to carry that colt to the end without losing control, he was a bit far from the “red John Kennedy” or “the new Pedro El Grande” that the Western press thought he saw when he came to power in March 1985.

It has also lived on horseback since its historical time. Born on 2 March 1931: too late to have suffered the first great war, too young to discover in time the massive crimes of Stalin, too young to take part in the second world war: Gorbachev turns 14 in April 1945, when his compatriot , Marshal Georgy Zhukov, enters Berlin with blood and fire to put an end to that Third Reich of Adolf Hitler which would last a thousand years and last twelve.

His hometown was Privolye, in the south of Russia and in the north of the Caucasus: cereals and sheep. Legend swears that Mikhail’s first job was driving a tractor on a collective farm. Actually his first job was supposed to be convinced and applied communist who has followed the steps of the local PC in an orderly and careful way. His question and his interest in him earned him an unexpected fate in 1950 for the son of a farmer who drives tractors: admission to Moscow State University, where he studied law and agronomy.

Three or four events marked the life of Gorbachev in those years: he organized the university communist leagues; he meets a beautiful and slender girl, Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, marries her and they have a daughter, Irina; he graduates in law and decides to return to his city. There he rises into the hierarchy of the regional CP under the eyes of the Kremlin’s political and ideological mentor, Mikhail Suslov. In 1971, at the age of 40, he joined the Central Committee: a beautiful conquest in an area that was not characterized by the youth of his leaders and which was mercilessly called “gerontocracy”.

His fate was not in Stavropol but in Moscow, where he returned in 1978 no longer under the ideological tutelage of Suslov, but under the iron gaze of another godfather, Yuri Andropov, head of the secret services of the USSR for almost a decade, the KGB. Gorbachev served as agriculture secretary in the years of the almighty Leonid Brezhnev and launched the first of his reform plans: he decentralized decision-making, gave farmers production incentives and fired a number of corrupt officials. Upon Brezhnev’s death in 1982, Andropov became the leader of the USSR and Gorbachev determined to take power. He knew, he sensed or was revealed to him, the change that was coming to the world: almost three years ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had dedicated themselves to the so-called “conservative revolution”, which had much of the latter and little of the former, Y Gorbachev understood that the USSR had to modernize. He also understood that it was not the Kremlin that he had to conquer, that it was already given, but that world that changed by the minute and that was beyond the enormous borders of his nation, which he saw stagnant, paralyzed.

In 1983 he visited Canada and in 1984 he visited Great Britain. It dazzles. Thatcher defined him with the precision of a heart surgeon: “He is a Soviet whose face moves when he speaks. You can see what he’s thinking. “Told by Thatcher, who had a granite face, it was a compliment. In London, Gorbachev spread allure and the nonsense that narrow-mindedness calls glamor. He wore fashionable clothes, smiled unthinkable for a leader of the USSR, he wasted punchy humor and allowed himself to be photographed with a typical Texan hat. The British press immediately dubbed him “Companion Gucci.” He also added a dose of mystery to his figure: his forehead and bald head had a stain of enigmatic form and meaning from birth, a hemangioma caused by the increase in size and number of small blood vessels in and under the skin.

Three screenshots of that visit to Britain. At the British Museum, where Karl Marx wrote “Capital”, Gorbachev challenged: “If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.” In front of the photographers who machine-gunned him with flashes, he issued a clear Communist-style warning: “Comrades, save your supplies.” And he stopped a conservative legislator who dared to talk to him about the persecuted and imprisoned in the USSR: “You take charge of governing your society and let us govern ours”. The British, who sometimes enjoy being flogged, have loved him forever.

On the same trip, he challenged Reagan’s cynical military policy which promoted the reduction of the nuclear arsenal of both powers, while promoting a strategic missile defense plan that became famous and historic as “Star Wars”. “If we can make the economy go well”, he said, “politics and peace will take care of themselves”. He was the first: “It’s the economy, stupid!” released to the world, long before Bill Clinton imagined it.

When in 1984 his friend and mentor, Yuri Andropov, died in the exercise of maximum power, as was the style in the USSR, the “gerontocracy” named Konstantin Chernenko, a man of advanced age and health, who reigned just thirteen months and of which Gorbachev was his number two, in a dress rehearsal of what was to come. In March 1985, a few hours after Chernenko’s death, Gorbachev was unanimously elected, which is unusual, General Secretary of the CP of the USSR. Back then this meant full powers. The gerontocracy had given way to a new generation. Gorbachev was the first of the Soviet leaders born after the 1917 Revolution and also the first to reach the top with a university degree under his arm. Unlike his predecessors, the now Soviet leader had forged his image abroad through eleven trips abroad, six of them to Western countries.

His inaugural address laid the groundwork for the change to come. The USSR, he said, had to “make a decisive turn in its economy to apply socialist principles in a creative way”; It suggested, and urged thinking, that within a planned economy there was room “to encourage the independence of firms and arouse their interest in the final product of their work” and issued a warning: the greatest benefits materials “can hinder social justice”. He also sent two messages to Reagan. An audience: “We want a real and greater reduction of weapons and not the development of new weapon systems, both in space and on Earth.” The other message was private and in response to a letter Reagan had sent him through Bush: he was willing to talk to the United States anytime, anywhere. If the end of the Cold War, which was neither war nor cold, had a beginning, perhaps that was it. Eight months later, in Geneva, the United States and the USSR, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to halve their nuclear arsenals.

At that point, without knowing it, the Soviet leader had gone to bed with the enemy: he had appointed his friend Boris Yeltsin (they had known each other since 1976) deputy and mayor of Moscow with the mission to put an end to corruption in the local CP and in the city. Yeltsin, who based his political ideals on vodka, soon became a staunch critic of Gorbachev and his slowness in addressing the reforms he proclaimed. The new leader of the USSR was trapped in the arms of a stranglehold that would never loosen: those who, like Yeltsin and his followers, criticized him for his slowness, and the Communist conservatives who criticized his breadth and depth. of changes.

Gorbachev nailed two Russian words that the West quickly learned: glasnost, which means openness, transparency and perestroika, equal to reconstruction. And he started walking. Between 1987 and 1988, by law signed, Soviet societies enjoyed greater freedoms. And individuals too. Thousands of dissidents were released and many of the figures persecuted and annihilated by Stalin were avenged, in an example of memory and justice, always useful for the growth of nations. There was greater religious freedom and control over the press was somewhat loosened. In May 1988, the Cooperative Act allowed private ownership of service companies, the manufacturing industry and foreign trade.

His years were clouded by the Chernobyl tragedy in April 1986, by the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989, the triumph of peace but military defeat for the USSR, and by the malice of Mathías Rust, a German boy who in 1987 landed his Cessna 172 on Red Squareafter bypassing all superpower radars and making it clear that military power did not get along with Gorbachev.

The rest is known history. Gorbachev’s Kremlin stopped supporting Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, especially that of the German Democratic Republic, which would have contributed to the collapse of Communism in the region and the fall of the Berlin Wall after Reagan triumphantly and forewarned, issued a challenge. historian: “Mr. Gorbachev, come to these doors. Mr. Gorbachev, open these doors! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! ” Reagan said on June 12, 1987, with the Brandenburg Gate and the Wall behind him.

The wall fell in November 1989 and Mr. Gorbachev was too busy fighting the economic shipwreck of his reforms.

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