Mikhail Gorbachev His life was a grandiose misunderstanding

In order to make an exemplary apparatchik career in the totalitarian Soviet Union, you need certain skills. In the bitter power struggle among party comrades, Comrade Mikhail Gorbachev, who came from a collective farm in the Stavropol region, quickly paved the way to the top. As a Komsomol functionary, he received the Order of the Red Banner at the age of 19. At the age of 21 he joined the party and knew how to climb the career ladder. The tried and tested means of doing this has always been protection, you just had to remain loyal and useful to the right boss.

For many years his patron was the party bigwig Fyodor Kulakov. After his death in 1978, Gorbachev inherited his office as Central Committee Secretary for Agriculture. Then Yuri Andropov, the head of the secret police, pulled him closer. As the youngest member of the Politburo, Gorbachev’s radiant health made his mark on the elderly committee. One by one the secretaries-general began to die, and suddenly the devoted builder of communism was given the opportunity to direct the fortunes of the Soviet empire.

logical end

It was then that the bad times began for the Soviet Union – the rotten system was rolling towards its collapse. The decades-long arms race had exhausted the inefficient economy. In order to save the USSR as such, it was absolutely necessary to end the military confrontation.

The collapse of the non-viable plan-mismanagement had begun long before Gorbachev. For a short time, the increase in oil exports with rising prices averted the collapse, but the collapse in oil prices after 1986 accelerated the destruction of finance and consumption. There was simply no foreign currency for huge grain imports, so credit was needed in the West. The real socialism came to the logical end, the state could not provide the population with goods for daily use or with food, there was nothing.

Something had to be done to save the rotten Soviet model from collapsing, and Gorbachev opted for the “perestroika” rescue plan. The goal was to get credit and technology from the West. In return, you had to offer something attractive to the West.

There was already experience from the early 1970s, when you could “sell” détente and Jews. In exchange for permission to emigrate to Israel, the Soviet Union received grain supplies from the USA. The détente ended with the war in Afghanistan.

Now Gorbachev wanted to thread the same deal on a larger scale. First came the nice words that the West wanted to hear: “glasnost,” “democratization,” “openness,” then the political prisoners like Andrei Sakharov. After all, it had to be something more real. The West had German reunification on the agenda, and Ronald Reagan announced the tariff in Berlin: “Tear down this wall!”

Gorbachev kissed Honecker for the last time – with a Judas kiss. Moscow’s renunciation of East Germany was intended to be a piece sacrifice in play on the European chessboard in order to win the game overall and overcome the deep economic crisis in the USSR. Now the sesame opened, credits flowed in torrents. The Kremlin boss became «Gorbi». No Russian has ever been so loved in the West.

The Nato enemy image was hidden in the storage room until further notice. The migrating “Birnam Forest” seemed to have been halted in the west, but “perestroika” was going off the rails at home.

my father is crying

In Gorbachev’s time, when the hard years of hunger began, my father, as a war veteran, received aid packages, including food from Germany. He felt this as a personal humiliation. All their life he and his comrades had felt victorious, and now they were to eat the crumbs from the defeated enemy’s table. When father brought us the food ration for the first time, he got drunk and yelled: “But we won!” Then he went quiet and cried and asked God knows who, but turned to me, “Tell me, did we win or lose the war?”

For some, perestroika meant above all the democratization of the system, for others the lack of a hand to bring order and foreseeable chaos. For their part, the oppressed peoples saw the opportunity to get out of prison. Blood was already flowing on the fringes of the empire. A demonstration was broken up in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, when 100,000 people took to the streets to demand Georgia’s exit from the Soviet Union. Soldiers killed protesters with field spades. In Vilnius, during the storming of the Lithuanian television tower, some unarmed Lithuanians were run over by tanks of the Soviet army and some were shot. Power tried by all means to force the genie of freedom back into the bottle.

The confused Soviet population struggled to survive in the chaos. The slogan was: “Save yourself who can.” The awakened civil society demanded “European” freedoms and the complete dismantling of the hated party system at demonstrations in the center of Moscow.

The magic word perestroika turned life upside down. For me personally, hope returned. I remember how great it was back then to see the banned names of poets who had been shot reappear in the magazines. Gorbachev wanted to save the regime, but his slogans of democratization became independent. He lost control of what was happening in the country.

The political concessions to the West were seen as treason by the majority of the population in their own country. My father hated Gorbachev. I didn’t like Gorbachev either, but not because of that, but because he wanted to stop the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet system with all his might. My father and I looked at the story unfolding before our eyes from different angles.

In the West, the “reforms” were followed with hope and enthusiasm. You only saw what you wanted to see. The rampant Gorbachev cult had nothing to do with his real person, rather he embodied the personified euphoria over a historical miracle: the “Russian soul” was freed from the spell of communist witchcraft, and there was no need to be afraid of “those over there”. to have more.

The prince who kissed the sleeping princess of democracy awake, who saved the world from nuclear war and who let divided Germany find itself again, became a figure of light who was hoped to perform further miracles and lead the Soviet Union into the bourgeois European home. In reality, however, his intentions were other than to dissolve “the prison of the peoples,” to ban the communist party, and to introduce true democracy. The colossus staggered toward collapse, and Gorbachev was determined to prevent that.

Complete bluff

The unity of the Soviet republics was the imagination of communist propaganda, and the party leader fell victim to his own lies. On March 17, 1991, he held the only popular referendum in Soviet history: “Should the Soviet Union remain as a single state?” 70 percent in Ukraine, 82 percent in Belarus, 93 percent in Uzbekistan, 94 percent in Kazakhstan, 93 percent in Azerbaijan, 96 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 96 percent in Tajikistan, 97 percent in Turkmenistan answered with a clear “yes”. A few months later, the Soviet empire collapsed and the unity of peoples turned out to be a complete bluff. In the national republics, the long-awaited independence from “big brother” was greeted with jubilation.

Like any dictator, Gorbachev did not know the country he ruled over, being separated from it by bayonets and referendums. Even his former chief of protocol, Vladimir Shevchenko, admitted it: “There was a miscalculation: we didn’t know our country well enough, we didn’t know our nomenklatura well enough. Our community broke up, that was our tragedy and his.”

Not only for Putin, but also for Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. In the film «Gorbachev. Paradise», a masterpiece by Vitaly Manski from 2020, he explains that he remained a convinced communist even at the end of his life: «I see Lenin as our God.» Gorbachev wanted to modernize his rotten, communist empire, but he was a weak dictator: “I was told to shoot and I replied that this was not the right way.” He considered the collapse and end of the Soviet Union to be a coup d’état.

Attempts by Gorbachev and putschists to save the regime failed. At that time, Russia was given the opportunity to build a democratic social order, but it failed. The mistakes made by the Democrats from the start are now bearing their evil fruits. There was no “decommunization”, no coming to terms with history, no abolition of the monstrous KGB, no “Nuremberg trials” against the party. The emergence of a new dictatorship was therefore only a matter of time. In the trial of the CPSU, Gorbachev would certainly have been in the dock as the leader of this criminal organization.

In 2014, Mikhail Gorbachev defended Putin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. For him, it was a step toward reestablishing the USSR, which he felt guilty about breaking down. We owe the short-lived freedom and geopolitical upheaval of the 1990s to Gorbachev. He was great not in his successes, but in his failures.

Mikhail Shishkin, Born in Moscow in 1961, is one of the leading contemporary Russian authors.