Gorbachev - The Rise and Fall of a Hero

Mikhail Gorbachev

---

Garton Ash's reminder feels long overdue. For there is a conundrum concerning Gorbachev: Is it, perhaps, because his momentous experiment ended so inauspiciously with a failed coup, the implosion of the Soviet Union on a wave of nationalist sentiment in the republics and Russia itself, and a resignation that effectively finished his political career?

Events that preceded the rise of a voraciously destructive klepto-politics in Russia , so venal that people would come to yearn for the certainties even of Stalin's rule. Or is it because the world has judged that he has diminished himself with the album of traditional ballads, the adverts for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton, the speaking tours and celebrity galas, the cameo film role in a Wim Wenders film playing — inevitably — himself? Stage antics of an old gunslinger trading on fading memory.

Not the Gorbachev of now, but the "Gorby" of then: The builder of bridges with the west, renouncer of the Stalinist notions of the use of force, who, through his actions and inactions, changed the world. The man with whom Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could do business.

For while what he attempted for the Soviet Union has crumbled, what has survived has been the legacy of that remarkable year two decades ago when eastern and central Europe were plunged into a series of largely bloodless revolutions against their Warsaw Pact leaders. And Gorbachev did not send in the tanks.

Mikhail Gorbachev – the forgotten hero of history

But there was more to it than that. In many respects, Gorbachev set the conditions for that year of revolutions, leaving a question to persist: Born in Privolnoye, near Stavropol in , Gorbachev's was a remarkable rise. Driving combine harvesters in his teens, he went on to read law at Moscow State University where he met his wife, Raisa.

The years that would follow, after he joined the Communist party, were marked by a precocious advance: Despite his conservative outlook, Suslov would inform the development of Gorbachev's later ideas, opposing force except as what he regarded as a last resort — although that definition included the crushing of the Prague Spring in What Gorbachev represented as he rose to power, as Garton Ash noted, was not lost on some of his fellow politburo members, including Andrei Gromyko, the tough and long-serving Soviet foreign minister. Privately, Gromyko nicknamed Gorbachev and his close circle "the Martians" for failing to understand Stalin's hardheaded rules of realpolitik.

Through his advocacy of "universal values" and his renunciation of old Soviet military doctrine, Gorbachev created the circumstances in which it was impossible for his old eastern European allies to survive. Having done that, his only course of action was to decide whether or not to intervene. It would be in the midst of the social upheavals the following year in East Germany that Gorbachev would make his most important intervention. In October , visiting the country for the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, led by hardliner Erich Honecker, he attempted to encourage him to institute reforms.

A month before the wall came down Gorbachev warned him: But even as was unfolding, the seeds of Gorbachev's own fall had been sown - the accelerating dissolution of the Soviet Union itself and the implosion of the party which would see hardliners launch an abortive coup against him two years later. Arguably, it was a consequence of Gorbachev's misunderstanding of how glasnost, perestroika and nationalism would fatally combine. Since then, Gorbachev has hovered on the sidelines, a sometimes bitter observer of the Yeltsin and Putin years, failing in an attempted return to politics in the mids.

He has been a fierce critic of the unfettered capitalism which ruined so many Russians in the Yeltsin era, saying it has convinced him that capitalism needed to be moderated by socialism.

These days, he is often most publicly visible in unexpected company: One thing, however, is clear. He might be close to 80, but he is still not ready to give up, as an interviewer discovered this year when she asked how he saw his place in history. As a teenager he drove harvesters on collective farms.

Met his future wife Raisa at Moscow State University. They had one daughter. Gorbachev has a crimson birthmark on the top of his bald head, which was rubbed out in official Politburo photos.

Product details

As Communist Party head from until , he pushed through sweeping political, economic and foreign policy reforms. His economic policies brought the Soviet Union close to disaster and hastened its disintegration. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard. Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Sign into your NZ Herald. On the go and no time to finish that story right now?

Your News is the place for you to save content to read later from any device. Register with us and content you save will appear here so you can access them to read later. By relaxing bureaucracy and censorship Gorbachev hoped to transform the Stalinist Soviet regime into a more modern social democracy. While glasnost was widely celebrated, his attempts to restructure the Soviet economy largely floundered. Gorbachev saw that vast sums of money were being poured into the military to keep up with the US.

Desperate to free up this money, Gorbachev fostered a warmer relationship with the West. In a series of high-profile summits Gorbachev met President Reagan and the two men made important nuclear disarmament agreements.

Frequently bought together

The thaw in relations effectively signalled the end of the Cold War. By the end of his tenure the Berlin Wall had been pulled down and large republics such as Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania had declared their independence. In reactionary hard-liners in the Communist Party, fearing the collapse of the Soviet Union, attempted to remove Gorbachev. Imprisoned in his dacha holiday home in the Crimea Gorbachev listened on the radio as the military attempted to seize control of the Russian parliament.

Thwarted by the efforts of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and mass protests the coup failed.

Gorbachev returned to Moscow but soon realised that the balance of power and popular support had shifted to Yeltsin. After the failed coup Yeltsin struck two blows that effectively ended the Soviet Union — and in the process the career of Gorbachev. Secondly he, along with the presidents of Ukraine and Belorussia, signed a treaty to create a new commonwealth of republics.

Without these key nations the Soviet Union was defunct.

• EL INTREPIDO SOLDADITO DE PLOMO- HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (Spanish Edition)
• That Bitch a Collection of Short Stories
• Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration
• 5 Ticket Tales
• Radikal: Thriller (German Edition)
• A Gentle Axe: St Petersburg Mystery (St. Petersburg Mystery)