The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, died on Tuesday at the age of 91 in Russia, a hospital was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. His death comes amid current Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offensive in Ukraine, launched on February 24 and denounced in the West as a resurgence of Russian imperialism.
The simple son of a peasant, Mikhail Gorbachev followed a classic apparatchik course to become, at the age of 54, on March 11, 1985, number one in a Soviet empire that was economically battered at the time and was entangled in an endless war in Afghanistan.
“Of course I regret it”
Aware that the crisis is looming, Gorbachev launches a liberalization called “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (transparency) to reform the Soviet system and reduce the influence of the old party bosses.
Millions of Soviets then discovered unprecedented freedoms, but also scarcity, economic chaos and nationalist revolts that would sound like the death of the USSR, that many of their compatriots would never forgive this man with a forehead marked with a wine stain. .
“Of course I regret it, big mistakes were made,” he said in January 2011.
Because under his mandate there was no shortage of excesses: the entry of Soviet tanks into Lithuania, the repression of peaceful protesters in Georgia or the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986, passed by in silence for days, contributing to the contamination of hundreds of thousands of people.
A controversial legacy
In the West, whether it be German Chancellor Helmut Kohl or US President Ronald Reagan, the leaders of the capitalist world are fascinated by this new interlocutor open to negotiation. “I like Mr. Gorbachev, he is a man you can deal with,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of him.
Nuclear disarmament agreement, refusal to intervene militarily to defend the Iron Curtain, withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan: the Soviet number one is decidedly different.
This respect will never go away in the West because of its restraint when the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland came down. He will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
“The most important events of the 20th century were the emancipation of women and the liberation from Russia” of the man nicknamed “Gorbi,” stressed Israeli leader Shimon Peres, another Nobel laureate.
“I wanted to change everything without changing anything in the background”
But for the Russians, Gorbachev has destroyed their country’s great power status, and they have nothing but disdain for this poor orator with a slurred accent from his native Stavropol region (south).
“A spontaneous politician who never thought about the consequences, Gorbachev wanted to change everything without changing anything in the background,” summarizes the historian Irina Karatsouba.
“Socialism with a human face fizzled out when oil prices crashed and the Cold War was lost. Gorbachev’s enigma will be debated for a long time: what depended on him and what did not”, he analyzes.
Source: BFM TV
