Gorbachev

Here are a few mainstream obituary reports on Mikail Gorbachev's passing.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev dies aged 91 DW News 08/30/2022:

World leaders react to Gorbachev's death amid Russian tensions with West DW News 08/31/2022:

A look at the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, final leader of the Soviet Union PBS Newshour 08/31/2022:

Anton Fedyashin summarized Gorbachev's historical legacy in The Tragic Heroism of Mikhail Gorbachev The National Interest 08/30/2022:

The Western image of Mikhail Gorbachev as the victorious slayer of communism is not wrong but lacks nuance on three issues. First, his original goal was to reform and salvage, not destroy, both the Communist Party and the USSR. Second, the Cold War ended before, not because of, the dismantlement of the USSR in 1991. And third, the triumphalist interpretation of the Cold War’s end as a Western victory obscures the fact that Russia’s fundamental geopolitical and security interests have undergone territorial but not existential change. The current debacle in Ukraine is proof of that. The depth of Gorbachev’s commitment to domestic and international pluralism makes clear why he both criticized Vladimir Putin’s domestic practices and supported his overall foreign policy strategy. [my emphasis]

Juan Cole reminds us of one of Gorbachev's important decisions, the withdrawal Soviet troops from Afghanistan: That Time Gorbachev Announced Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan and US went on Building up Muslim Fundamentalists there Anyway, leading to 9/11 Informed Comment 08/31/2022: "Gorbachev pulled the last Soviet tanks out of Afghanistan in February, 1989. Twelve years later al-Qaeda took down the Twin Towers, and the US went on to fight its own 20-year, fruitless war in Afghanistan."

Anatol Lieven looks atthis legacy in The tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev Responsible Statecraft 08/30/2022. He focuses on the aspect of management of the disintegration of an empire, a framework that is still used to analyze the recent history of Ukraine-Russia relations:

Gorbachev’s failure is often contrasted unfavorably with the tremendous success of Deng Xiaoping in transforming Communist China during the same period, while at the same time holding the state together. This is however not entirely fair. Unlike China, not only was the Soviet Union itself a huge multinational state in which ethnic Russians were the minority, but it also ruled over large, ancient, and restive nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

Given Polish, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian history, and the enforced division of Germany, it was a certainty that as soon as Communist repression was relaxed, these countries would revolt. Given that they bordered on the USSR itself, it was also highly probable that the resulting unrest would spread to Soviet nationalities. Preventing this would have required ferocious repression. Not only did this contradict Gorbachev’s whole program, but he himself seemed to have genuinely shrunk from it. [my emphasis]

Politico presents this long obituary by David Cohen, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s final leader, dies 08/31/2022.

There are a couple of important themes that I would like to see treated more extensively in the coverage of Gorbachev's legacy. One would be a serious look as his understanding of Marxism, his public presentation of which certainly evolved. He understood his glasnost policy of liberalizing policies discussion, his perestroika approach to economic restructuring, and his desire to move the USSR to adopting a social-democratic political system with competitive elections.

Gorbachev's political outlook

This safely establishment piece at the Council on Foreign Relations website touches on this almost in passing: Thomas Graham, Gorbachev: Conflicted Catalyst of Cold War’s End 08/31/2022. Graham quotes him as saying, “The Communist ideal used to be and still remains an attractive landmark.” As Chris Miller recounts in his 2016 book, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR, Gorbachev was out to reform and reinvigorate the socialist economy and address its issues of lagging modernization and the heavy dependence of energy exports. The latter factor made the USSR, not unlike the Russia of 2022, subject to swings in world oil prices. That vulnerability was almost certainly a bigger factor in the USSR's end than the Afghanistan War, which Cold War triumphalists saw as a great success for the West.

And, no, Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall speech" had next to no effect on political developments in the late USSR. Or even on the fall of the Berlin wall itself, for that matter. Its not as though Germans east and west hadn't considered the wall and the more general travel restricts as a problem until Reagan pointed it out to them.

Gorbachev did call in his last year as Soviet leader for adjustments in the official Party positions, as reported in this article whose headline is at least partially misleading: Michael Parks, Gorbachev Urges Party to Abandon Marxist Ideology Los Angeles Times 07/26/1991.

Strobe Talbott also touches on those aspects in his review of a Gorbachev biography by William Taubman, The Man Who Lost an Empire New York Review 12/21/2017.

Perestroika and Chinese Economic Reform

I would also like to see more on what Gorbachev tried to learn from China's version of economic reform. The Chinese website - presumably expressing some form of the official government position - touches on this in an article under the name Chen Qingqing, Chinese observers express mixed feelings about Gorbachev, draw lessons from his immature policy of cozying up with West Global Times 08/31/2022. It's not very flattering about his economic record:

In hindsight, Gorbachev is naïve and immature, some observers said, and he represented a certain historical period of USSR, later Russia, shifting between the paths of "seeking an independent way" and "embracing the West." Blindly worshipping the Western system made the USSR lose independence, and the Russian people suffered from the political instability and severe economic hardship, which China considered a major warning and lesson to draw experience from for its own governance, observers said.

But Gorbachev did look to the post-Mao Chinese reforms for lessons on how to adapt the socialist system in the USSR. He was not looking for anything like the neoliberal, market-fundamentalist "shock therapy" strategy that was implemented in Russia after 1991. And he did not "blindly" worship Western capitalism as the Global Times article asserts.

Gorbachev and Ukraine

AFP has this piece mentioning on Gorbachev's position on the current Ukraine war, To Ukrainians, Gorbachev remains an 'imperialist' 08/31/2022.

Gorbachev supported Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. (Opposing views on Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy DW News 08/31/2022) And he appeared to broadly support Putin's foreign policy positions on Ukraine, though apparently he didn't publicly take a position on this year's invasion. Gorbachev also criticized NATO enlargement.

Yana Dlugy reports (From Gorbachev to Putin New York Times 08/31/2022

Gorbachev’s legacy in Ukraine is complicated. The son of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, Gorbachev backed Putin’s view of Ukraine as a “brotherly nation” that should be in Russia’s orbit, and he never publicly disavowed the Russian leader.

He confounded many when he supported Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, describing the move as representing the will of a region heavily populated by people who identified as Russian.

Gorbachev, who was ill in the last years of his life and was in the hospital when he died, did not issue any public statements on the war, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” Venediktov said that he was “upset” about it.