Gorbachev Died Without Achieving What He Had Set Out To Do: Analyst

Missing from most Western accounts is how Gorbachev’s thinking was both socialist and liberal at the same time, and was aimed at preserving the USSR above all. For better and worse, he was a product of the Soviet system: a figure who tried to save it while transcending it.

Photo Insert: The structural and personal elements of Gorbachev are impossible to separate: a “reformer” like him would have emerged regardless because Soviet economic decline and superpower overhang was discussed openly within the elite.

But transformation was a contradiction in terms for a party-state whose rule was based on coercion and whose main source of legitimacy depended on rising living standards – which Gorbachev was neither willing nor able to provide, Thomas Rowley wrote for UK’s openDemocracy.

Gorbachev was far from genuinely radical on the domestic front, instead picking up on various reformist ideas that had been knocking around for decades without really understanding their implications.

He pursued limited and piecemeal economic liberalization, elections without politics, press freedom without public accountability, historical revisionism without a national idea, and human rights without dismantling the powerful security organs.

As the Soviet political system became genuinely competitive, he wavered at the last moment – not understanding that when you give people a voice and a choice, they won’t necessarily support you out of gratitude.

Once more, the danger is to view Gorbachev through our Western lenses of individual freedom and choice (it is puzzling that so much attention is given to the supposed symbolism of his Pizza Hut commercial).

Born to a peasant family, Gorbachev is an example of the remarkable mass phenomenon of upward social mobility in the USSR that more than one generation benefitted from.

A genuinely talented, sincere individual promoted to a position where his limitations became fatal to the Soviet project.

The structural and personal elements of Gorbachev are impossible to separate: a “reformer” like him would have emerged regardless because Soviet economic decline and superpower overhang was discussed openly within the elite.

But the individual component was produced in a particular liberal milieu of 1960s neo-Leninist enthusiasm fused with intellectual dreams of reintegration with ‘the common stream of world civilization’ – understood as a fuzzy ideal of Europe.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic