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Forty Years After: Personality and History (Part I). Russia in Global Affairs, 23(3), pp. 48–68. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-3-48-68
Forty years since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Russia in Global Affairs asked political scientists and international relations experts in different countries to say how, living in a completely different world of today, they assess the events of that time and the role of his ‘new political thinking.’
Part II
Da Wei, Professor and Director, Center for International Security and Strategy, Tsinghua University
This date presents a particularly fitting occasion to reflect on Mikhail Gorbachev and the reforms he championed. This moment is significant not only because it marks the 40th anniversary of Gorbachev’s appointment as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but also because, with Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States, the international liberal order that Gorbachev once aspired to embrace appears to be unraveling at an astonishing pace.
Looking back at the historical choices made by the leaders of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern European countries in the 1980s, we can now discern an underlying contradiction that has persisted over the past four decades. This contradiction lies in the tension between liberalism as an ideological force and the Realpolitik of strategic competition among nation-states.
As an ideology, liberalism embodies some of humanity’s most profound aspirations. It advocates for the unleashing of entrepreneurial spirit through free competition, the protection and advancement of fundamental human rights, and the dismantling of barriers to communication between different nations and societies. Over the past forty years, these ideals have gained widespread global support, including in Russia and China, where they have facilitated significant transformations. In both countries, the liberalization of certain sectors has led to an unprecedented unleashing of human potential. In China, in particular, nearly all segments of society have benefited immensely from this process.
At the same time, liberalism has never functioned merely as a set of ideas. Since the Cold War, it has also served as a strategic instrument for the West in its competition with the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. Gorbachev sought to reform the Soviet Union by embracing some aspects of liberalism, but his efforts ultimately precipitated its dissolution. Subsequent Russian leaders attempted to integrate into the Western-led global order, but this process proved to be both painful and frustrating. Russia’s attempts to embrace liberalism did not yield the respect it had anticipated; instead, the liberal West treated Russia like a defeated power. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine three years ago marked the definitive end of Russia’s integration into the liberal order. A similar, albeit less severe, dynamic characterizes China’s relationship with the West, contributing to a widespread sense of sympathy for Russia among China’s ordinary people.
Today many view Gorbachev as a “naïve” political leader. If true, should a politician retain a degree of “naïveté”? This is a difficult question to answer. In the immediate realm of international politics, “naïveté” is often perceived as a weakness. However, in the long term, the moral and ideological commitments that underlie such “naïveté” may, in fact, serve as a necessary driving force in political life. Although liberalism is currently experiencing a period of decline, the values embedded in Gorbachev’s vision may, in the future, once again serve as a source of aspiration. From this perspective, debates about Gorbachev’s legacy are likely to endure for years to come.
Chas Freeman, American diplomat and scientist, retired ambassador
Sometimes individuals catalyze Zeitenwenden. Such was the case forty years ago, when Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The first Soviet leader to have been born after the founding of the USSR, he led it as its empire dissolved, and the Cold War ended. He sought the strategic redirection of his country to enable its reform. His courage and integrity won respect in the West but not the support necessary to restructure the Soviet system without undue suffering or to bring a new order smoothly into being.
Sadly, to Mr. Gorbachev’s great disappointment, his effort to resume the drive to integrate Russia with the rest of Europe that Peter the Great initiated has been followed by its opposite. Europe has turned its back on Russia, and Russia now faces East and South rather than West.
Sometimes there is nobility in failure. Mr. Gorbachev will be remembered as a great man who tried to do what was right for his country, for Europe, and for world peace. His vision may have exceeded his grasp, but it has not been invalidated. After the current, tragic warfare in Europe ends, Mr. Gorbachev’s vision may yet be realized. It is worth giving that a serious try.
Richard Sakwa, Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Kent, UK
In his famous poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), Matthew Arnold describes the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of organized religion as Christianity gave way to a more secular society. A similar dilemma faced Mikhail Gorbachev when he assumed the Soviet leadership in March 1985. The idea of socialism as the ‘common sense’ of the times had long been in retreat, in the West and within the Soviet Union itself. In the West, the social democratic era that accompanied the extraordinary thirty-year period of European economic growth since 1945, the ‘trente glorieuses,’ from the mid-1970s gave way to a period of reinvigorated market-oriented political economy thinking. The election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in May 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in November 1980 signaled a new period of marketization, privatization and financialization, a package that is now known as neoliberalism. Market forces were unleashed and freed from earlier social controls, providing opportunities for some but accompanied by growing inequality and regional disparities. This was accompanied by the erosion of the social order that sustained much of the civic dimension of the so-called advanced democracies.
It was into this maelstrom that Gorbachev as Soviet leader stepped. The capitalist world was resurgent, with the wind of history filling its sails. By 1989, when Francis Fukuyama published his essay on the topic, some even believed in extraordinary claims about ‘the end of history’. This was not just a more theoretical elaboration of Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA), but a radical repudiation of belief in progress and in politics as a sphere of agonistic exchange and dialogue. In a perverse way, Gorbachev’s reforms opened up space for the revival of politics and elements of procedural democracy, but he did this at a time when the ideology of ‘anti-politics’ predominated. One manifestation of this was the intellectually incoherent emphasis at the time on ‘civil society.’ This does not mean that the dynamic development of associations and movements unleashed by Gorbachev’s reform were not important—far from it. This was a period of profound reawakening of independent civil activism and popular participation, still one of the greatest legacies of the perestroika years.
Unfortunately, much of this proved evanescent and disappeared into the void. The elections to the new Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, and the Russian equivalent in 1990, were genuine moments of political engagement and the radical transformation of institutional culture. However, all this ultimately took the form of a negative revolution: dismantling the institutions of Soviet power, including the once all-mighty Communist Party of the Soviet Union; and eventually disaggregating the country itself into its 15 constituent union republics. Gorbachev ultimately lost his sense of direction in the turbulent sea of change that he had unleashed. He set out on a very different path to the Chinese model of the ‘communism of reform,’ in which the Communist Party put itself at the head of the social and economic modernization of the country. The starting conditions and circumstances in the Soviet Union were very different from those in China, but this in itself does not explain why the existing instruments of power could not have been leveraged to achieve the desired transformation. Instead, Gorbachev dismantled the very structures of power that could have realized his reform ambitions.
Gorbachev launched a program of ‘reform communism.’ This drew on multiple sources for inspiration, including the ‘Action Program’ of the reforming Czechoslovak Communist Party of April 1968. The brave and inspiring attempt to establish ‘socialism with a human face’ was extinguished by the Warsaw Pact intervention, with over half a million troops, in August 1968. This was the greatest ‘self-invasion’ in history blocking the prospects for reform within the Soviet Union itself for the next two decades. By the time Gorbachev came to power, the tide had turned. Social democracy in the West was discredited, and in the Soviet Union few were ready to fight for socialism of any kind, even the ‘humane and democratic’ socialism that Gorbachev espoused. His model of reform communism lacked both intellectual energy and agency in society itself. Instead of ‘socialist legality,’ the popular demand was simply for legality; and in the factories and streets there was little sign of a working class on the march for social justice and reform socialism. By the end, of course, the entire society was engulfed by an economic crisis and national mobilization that made discussion of the desirable socio-political model largely redundant. Gorbachev was left on the “darkling plain,” “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night,” as Arnold puts it.
For decades before his accession, scholars in the various institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had been developing ideas that later came to be known as the New Political Thinking. The NPT represented a radical critique of the Marxist-Leninist view of international affairs. The NPT asserted that the capitalist powers were not inherently militaristic, that imperialism was a largely redundant and anachronistic concept, and that capitalist and socialist states could not just peacefully coexist but could enter into fruitful combination and mutual enrichment. Gorbachev wholeheartedly embraced these ideas, not simply to elevate the status of the Soviet Union as a norm innovator but as a genuine believer in multilateralism and the need to move beyond arms control towards a far more secure and peaceful security environment. At the core of this was an appeal to the spirit of 1945, the spirit that established the United Nations and the Charter international system which endures—just—to this day. Gorbachev came to power on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and it is clear from his personal biography that he had a horror of war.
Here once again history tricked him. The Political West was in no mood to become the model of political behavior represented by the ideologists of the NPT. Instead, it operated according to the ruthless ‘realist’ logic that the more dogmatic Marxist-Leninists had always attributed to it—red in tooth and claw. In ending the Cold War, Gorbachev was certainly not capitulating to the military and economic superiority of the West. Instead, he appealed to the impartiality of the universal norms represented by the Charter international system. Forty years ago, his appeal fell on deaf ears, and hence the prospect of a positive peace order after the Cold War was lost. This does not mean that Gorbachev’s appeal should not be heard. It remains as relevant as ever.
D.B. Venkatesh Varma, Former Ambassador of India to Russia 2018-2021; also served as a young diplomat in the Indian Embassy in Moscow during the Soviet collapse (1990-1992)
There can be no doubt that Gorbachev lived in historic times, but his tragedy was that history jumped at him, devouring his legacy, even in his lifetime. He wanted to revive democratic socialism in the Soviet Union—be a Lenin without the terror. Externally, he cut Soviet losses in Afghanistan, recognized the futility of an arms race with the West and worked for the democratization of international relations. Gorbachev’s inclination for unilateral concessions based on nothing more than vague Western assurances, and his proclivity to savor global praise, threw the Soviet Union off course. In the end, Soviet national powerlessness merged with Gorbachev’s personal helplessness that broke the country he hoped to reform.
Gorbachev evoked among the Indian people admiration and affection in the initial years. But this turned to disappointment and even disdain as he presided over the collapse of his country, by substituting action with prevarication and bringing great misery to the common people in Russia and elsewhere. In the end, the gap between global adulation and domestic disgust was all too visible. Whether this can ever be narrowed depends on the redemptive feelings of the Russian people and the healing properties of time.
İlter Turan, Emeritus Professor of Politics, İstanbul Bilgi University
When Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party 40 years ago, it was judged that those clamoring for reform had obtained a chance to put their ideas into action. Most observers thought that the outcome of the development would be changes in how the CPSU did things, how the Soviet government operated domestically, how the economy was run or even how the Soviet Union related to the world. Remembering that such periods of questioning and ensuing change had occurred before, nobody realized that they were at the beginning of a world transforming event. In retrospect, it is fascinating that experts, even those outside the Soviet Union who had made it their business to study and predict developments in both the USSR and the Socialist Bloc, did not sense that the country was at the beginning of a fundamental change that would lead to the dissolution of the Union.
None of us know about what forces shape history. Particularly, in a given situation, we are at a loss to predict if events would have taken a different course in case a different person had assumed power or if a current office holder would have pursued different policies. I suspect, however, that many of us minimize the role of individuals and focus on major social, economic, technological and natural causes even though we know that these are given meaning by individuals who then decide on a particular course of action. If we transpose the question to the case of Gorbachev, could we say that if a different First Secretary had been appointed, or if he had opted for a different set of policies, historical developments would have worked themselves out in a different direction? Of course, we do not know the answer, but I personally feel that we should not exaggerate the role of Mikhail Gorbachev.
My own persuasion is that historical change is formed by social, economic, technological and sometimes by natural causes. It is these causes that bring particular people with particular ideas or preferences to decision-making positions, not the other way around. While thoughts and preferences of an individual may influence the course of events, they do not do so to the extent that the flow of history is fundamentally altered. Take, for example, the Ottoman Empire, a non-capitalist, multi-ethnic empire, that the First World War brought to an end along with the other multi-national empire—the Austro-Hungarian. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk emerged as the leader of a nationalist struggle who then proceeded to found with success the Turkish nation-state, i.e., the Turkish Republic. It is historical forces that had led to the defeat of the empire that also made it possible for a leader who led the effort to establish a nation state to emerge. The particular nation-state, however, clearly bore Atatürk’s mark.
What about the Russian experience? I feel that the forces of change had been operating on the USSR for a long time, eventually opening the way for a reform-minded First Secretary to take over. He worked to reform the system but failed to preserve the system by reforming it; or rather, the system collapsed when no one anticipated it. Was this the result of Gorbachev’s policies? I think not.
There are many dimensions to what I am saying that would constitute grounds for prolonged debate to which I do not propose to get into now. Let me conclude with one observation, however. The Czarist Empire survived the end of multi-ethnic empires when the Soviets proposed the Communist glue to hold it together. The process was further assisted by the fact that many Asian peoples at the time were not yet economically or socially sufficiently advanced towards constituting nations. The end of the USSR, from that perspective, appears as if a historical process bringing an end to multi-ethnic empires moved towards its natural conclusion. This is a result for which clearly not Mr. Gorbachev but historical forces were responsible.
Yahia H. Zoubir, Visiting Senior Fellow, Middle East Council on Global Affairs (Doha, Qatar)
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked a pivotal shift in global geopolitics, significantly altering Russia’s role and perspective on international developments. Since the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s foreign policy and international outlook have evolved through various phases, reflecting its internal transformations and responses to global dynamics.
Internationally, Gorbachev sought to reduce Cold War tensions through policies of détente and engagement with the West. He pursued arms control agreements, such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, and withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, signaling a shift towards a more cooperative international stance. Gorbachev’s vision was one of integration into the global community, emphasizing multilateralism and cooperation. However, the rapid political changes and economic challenges within the Soviet Union led to its eventual collapse, leaving Russia to redefine its identity and role on the world stage.
Since Gorbachev, Russia’s view of international developments has been shaped by a desire to reclaim its status as a major global power while navigating a complex and often adversarial international environment. From Gorbachev’s cooperative engagement to Putin’s assertive Realpolitik, Russia’s foreign policy reflects a blend of historical legacies, strategic interests, and domestic imperatives. As Russia continues to face challenges from Western sanctions, regional conflicts, and global economic shifts, its international outlook will likely remain dynamic and multifaceted. Understanding Russia’s perspective requires acknowledging its historical experiences, strategic concerns, and the evolving global landscape in which it operates.
Rasigan Maharajh, Chief Director, Tshwane University of Technology; Associate Research Fellow, Tellus Institute; Trustee, Canon Collins Trust; Elected Member, Academy of Science of South Africa
When Mikhail Gorbachev raised ‘Perestroika’ (restructuring), ‘Glasnost’ (openness), and ‘Uskorenie’ (acceleration) as potential means towards the revitalisation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at the end of 1984 and three months before his elevation to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Republic of South Africa (RSA) remained under the brutal dictatorship of racist regime that was perpetrating a crime against humanity by enforcing its variety of racial capitalism and apartheid (separate development). The apartheid regime was itself reluctantly forced into considering reform since the uprising of students in Soweto on 16 June 1976 reignited the struggle for national liberation and its economy entered into a deepening organic crisis of accumulation. The reforms sought by the apartheid regime included an allocation of limited group rights to black local authorities for those classified as African, and who constituted most of the population of the country. Those who were categorized as colored and/or Indian would be allocated a vote for representation in a tricameral parliament which would, however, retain ‘white’ domination through constitutional provisions ensuring hegemony over key aspects of national policies, international relations, and financing.
As youthful activists of the mass democratic movement in the 1980s, we rejected the proposed reforms of the apartheid regime as insufficient and farcical in contrast to our demands for a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa. This provides some contextualization for our initial hearing of perestroika and glasnost as mechanisms seeking to renovate the Soviet state system.
Whilst enthused by the critique shared by Gorbachev with respect to enhancing the liberatory perspectives to improve the workings of non-capitalist development, we were also wary of the changing times and the possibility of capitulation in the Cold War between the USA and the USSR. The support to the national liberation movement from the USSR was immense and included a smaller though non-trivial contribution to the SACP from the CPSU. Joe Slovo, a Lithuanian-born South African compatriot was elected to the position of General Secretary of the SACP in 1986 and issued a discussion document entitled “Has Socialism Failed?” in 1989. According to Z Pallo Jordan: “With the coming of glasnost, it was once again Slovo’s incisive intellect that initiated the SACP’s re-appraisal, limited and incomplete though it was, of its past and of the socialism it has upheld. His pamphlet ‘Has Socialism Failed?’ remains unique among South African Marxist writings for the wide-ranging debate it provoked.”
Discussions on the meaning and implications of perestroika and glasnost were widespread in the academic literature (though most were still proscribed in South Africa), amongst those inside the mass democratic movement, and those deployed in underground work of the national liberation struggle. Some attention was also afforded to the debates in the liberal press and in progressive international discourses. We drew upon this ‘battle of ideas’ to better understand the dynamics of actually existing socialist economies and the challenges of political and social organization. For many of us, we sought to correlate the experiences of the peoples of the USSR with their CPSU, with our own national struggles against the apartheid regime and for peoples’ power. We paid particular attention to the role of the Party and the State in governance and management of development.
Following the unbanning of the national liberation movements and the SACP in 1990, these discussions enriched our understanding of the limitations and constraints of reconstruction and development for a post-apartheid dispensation. The conflation of the lack of perestroika and glasnost would, however, also serve to embolden neo-liberal advocates within the nationalist organization to eschew the Marxian critique of the political economy, and to promote market-based solutions rather than careful planning and coordination as means of economic development. Three decades after the democratic breakthrough of 1994, the Republic of South Africa remains amongst the world’s most unequal countries measured by GINI Coefficients as are the neighbouring countries in southern Africa.
As history has not ended (yet?) and new formations remain emergent in world systems, we should remember our actual histories and utilize our learning to ensure that the multipolar world under co-construction does neither stagnate nor collapse under bureaucratic rigidities of both the political parties and the state apparatuses governing their respective territories and peoples. Whilst perestroika and glasnost did not usher in the new context on their own, both concepts ostensibly contributed to improving our understanding of hitherto hidden practices and their contradiction with explicitly articulated principles of democratic participation, open transparency, and building productive capabilities that work for all.
Fabiano Mielniczuk, Professor of Political Science, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Forty years after coming to power, it is indisputable that Mikhail Gorbachev’s New Political Thinking played a critical role in bringing an end to the Soviet Union. However, there is no consensus on the weight of different factors in “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Because of this, it is difficult to formulate with precision the lessons that the period of 1985-1991 left as a legacy for contemporary international politics in general and for the former Soviet space in particular.
A good starting point may be framing the causes for the end of the Soviet Union at the level of problem analysis. The classic proposition suggests that the motivations for State action reside at the individual, the State and the international system levels. While different conceptions of human agency point to a relative variation in the behavior of individuals, as we move up the ladder of the levels the room for maneuver becomes more limited, so that the action of States constrained by the international system is better understood as belonging to the realm of necessity rather than will.
In this sense, the structural realist analyses of the early 1980s that predicted the continuation of the rivalry between the U.S. and the USSR for decades to come based their predictions on the relative maintenance of the material capabilities of both poles, which guaranteed strategic stability and limited the actions of decision-makers to act in the opposite direction. Faced with the failure of these predictions, many analysts resorted to the opposite extreme of individual agency and blamed Gorbachev’s actions, more specifically, his ideas, for the changes. Despite being innovative, many of these analyses distorted Gorbachev’s ideas by framing him in an ex post facto narrative that attributed to him the intention of ending the Cold War and, in a way that is even more aligned with today’s official U.S. discourse, introducing the liberal changes that resulted in the collapse of the USSR. The structural response to these voluntarist interpretations also came from an ex post facto reading that identified the USSR’s economic limitations in maintaining military competition with the West as the initial impetus for the New Political Thinking and its inefficiency in overcoming these limitations as the fundamental cause of its end.
Reality, however, seems to have been much more complex than the analytical capacity to understand it. Structural factors played a fundamental role, but not only from a material point of view, but also from an ideational one. Despite the rhetoric of a “new Cold War” that emerged in the West after Reagan came to power, the main agreements of the 1970s between the USA and the USSR had already created an environment of détente (SALT I, ABM and SALT II). Although Carter did not ratify SALT II after the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan and despite Reagan’s anti-communist rhetoric, the latter respected the provisions of SALT II until its end in 1985. It was the perception that a nuclear war with the West was at its most unlikely moment that created the conditions for the USSR to go through the worst governance crisis in its history (the replacement of four heads of state in 1982-1985) without any problems, and allowed the Soviet political elites to accept the emergence of a young politician with different ideas to govern the country.
The expectation of the USSR and the USA regarding the impossibility of a nuclear conflict, in fact, seems to have played a role in the very formulation of the New Political Thinking. The entertaining association between reducing spending on weapons and increasing economic prosperity—as portrayed in famous economic textbooks—requires a previous ideational truism: that in order to spontaneously reduce the production of weapons, their use should no longer be necessary. That is why the belief that cooperation between the former enemies was possible was Gorbachev’s main focus when negotiating disarmament agreements with the USA during his rule, not only his concerns about Soviet economic problems. Obviously, Gorbachev justified his actions by equality between the USA and the USSR and the ability of both to create international regimes to facilitate cooperation based on mutual respect for their sovereignty. This explains the relative success of the disarmament negotiations between the two superpowers at a pace unbelievable for the most attentive spectators of the time. The question that needs to be answered, however, is why internal economic changes were not as successful as external initiatives if the two dimensions were treated, from the beginning, as parts of the same process of historical transformation.
At the same time while détente in relations with the U.S. was accelerating, domestic political openness fueled demonstrations against the war in Afghanistan, and the refusal of local political authorities to reach the target numbers established by the central government created a military conscription crisis in the republics. Ethnic nationalist discourses soon began to fuel sovereignist attitudes in relation to the Soviet center. This situation had a direct impact on the positioning of the republics in their relationship with Gorbachev, and the much-needed renegotiation of economic responsibilities within the USSR between the republics and the central government was held hostage by politicians who embraced the nationalist card. The threat of the country’s fragmentation was used by Yeltsin and Kravchuk during the process of renegotiating the New Union Treaty, which undermined Gorbachev’s base of legitimacy among the population, as well as among the political and military leaders. In his desperation to obtain an agreement from the republics for the New Union Treaty, Gorbachev proposed recognizing the autonomy of the republics in a new “Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics.” The act of desperation came too late, and the failure of the August 1991 coup accelerated the fragmentation of the country.
The attempt to reproduce among the Soviet republics an order based on sovereign entities capable of establishing regimes of cooperation required prior arrangements that would mitigate mistrust and limit the voluntaristic outbursts of some republic leaders. Whereas the agreements between the U.S. and the USSR in the 1970s allowed the success of the New Political Thinking internationally, the lack of similar mechanisms in the USSR created an environment conducive to its fragmentation.
Uwe Klußmann, Historian; Der Spiegel editor (1990-2021); correspondent in Moscow (1999-2009)
My first impression from the new Soviet party leader, which as a TV viewer in West Germany I received in the spring of 1985, was surprisingly positive. The new General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, an energetic 54-year-old man, was in Leningrad doing something completely unusual for a Soviet party leader—he talked with passers-by on Nevsky Prospekt, speaking freely and encouraging the people around to share their opinions. Because “everything needs to be changed,” he argued. And for that he needed popular support.
Mikhail Gorbachev, full of good intentions, received, however, a difficult legacy. Relations between the Soviet Union and the West were complicated by the war in Afghanistan and by the deployment of Soviet missiles in the GDR and of American ones in Germany. The Soviet system had ossified, the CPSU’s monopoly on power and truth blocked any attempts at public discussion, goods were of poor quality and in short supply. Most citizens were not allowed to travel to Western countries. These were the circumstances in which Gorbachev proposed perestroika and glasnost. These words instilled hope, primarily in East Germans, which I was able to see during my trips there. Gorbachev’s desire to destroy the old Soviet bureaucracy structures was particularly evident during his speech at the January 1987 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee. His phrase “we need democracy like air” became the key point. Gorbachev also talked a lot about economic reforms, so soon the Soviet media were flooded with comments and suggestions.
However, the real situation in the country did not change. Upon my arrival in Moscow and Leningrad in October 1988, I found out that the supply crisis was worsening. And yet something else had added to that: three years after Gorbachev took office as General Secretary, Soviet society had lost hope for positive change. There was neither clear plan of action, nor any attempt to change the current situation. Freedom of speech, made possible by perestroika and glasnost, did not contribute to a better understanding of internal contradictions in Soviet society. It lacked instruments to timely identify and resolve conflict situations. Society, the CPSU and its leader were blindly moving towards the abyss.
Objectively speaking, Gorbachev the reformer had two options. The first one was to transform the Soviet Union into a modern European-like liberal constitutional state, a kind of United States of Eurasia. However, this was clearly at odds with the national elites in the Soviet republics, particularly their clannish party bureaucracy, which fueled nationalist sentiment and sought independence from Moscow. The Soviet Constitution allowed the republics, albeit in a very vague way, to secede from the Union. The second option implied preserving and strengthening the CPSU and its monopoly on power, and systemically implementing economic reforms. This is a kind of Chinese version of reform, which, like in China itself, would not have been possible without massive repression. Gorbachev carefully tried to combine both approaches. He wanted to sign a new union treaty with the Soviet republics but could not do it partly because he had not prevented senseless acts of violence in Georgia in 1989 and in the Baltic states in early 1991 against activists advocating separation from Moscow. It is only logical that, in 1990-1991, the elites of the Soviet Union’s largest constituent republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, decided to secede from the Union. So Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, which was his last position, became the king without a kingdom. The Gorbachev era resembles Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—the perestroika-clad emperor turned out to be naked.
Many obituaries after Gorbachev’s death, especially by Western politicians and journalists, credited him for the peaceful disintegration of the USSR. This may be true of the GDR but not of the Soviet Union itself. As a result of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Georgians and Abkhazians, South Ossetians and Georgians, residents of Transnistria and Moldova, Russians and Chechens got drawn into bloody, long-term wars with tens of thousands of casualties. The civil war in Tajikistan, which began in 1992 and lasted until 1997, was also a consequence of the Soviet Union’s collapse. This conflict alone claimed about 100,000 lives, which, of course, was overlooked by European observers.
Too many hopes were pinned on Gorbachev. Sociable, friendly, and eloquent, peasant by birth, had climbed to the top to become the chief executive of the state. The promotion of children of workers and peasants in Soviet society was not only nominally declared but was also actively practiced. Sometimes the results fell short of expectations. Gorbachev did not read much, and as General Secretary did not study intelligence reports. Also, lawyers, unlike such an exceptional connoisseur of people as Lenin, do not usually attach great importance to the analysis of historical and social issues, because they do not understand dialectics. The CPSU, at least under Gorbachev’s leadership, did not achieve the level of excellence that would have matched that of the Chinese Communist Party leaders.
Before Gorbachev’s party career took off, he studied law at Moscow State University and worked for 22 years in his native Stavropol Territory in southern Russia. Gorbachev was a local party functionary with a certain area of responsibility. I could see how deeply this period had affected Gorbachev when I met him as a journalist after the Soviet Union’s collapse. I first saw him in November 2001 at a congress of the Social Democratic Party of Russia he headed. He delivered a speech reminiscent of Soviet party days—a classic report about the successes of “our party, which is evolving,” strengthening its ranks, and so on. In reality, his party was a minor disparate grouping. Gorbachev continued to live in an illusory world. The tragedy was followed by farce. Gorbachev’s Social Democratic Party as a political organization was non-existent. A year later, Gorbachev resigned as chairman of this political sect. This strange episode with his leadership of the Social Democratic Party was caused by a double illusion. Some Western European politicians had hoped for Gorbachev’s political return and that the Russians would discover the values of social democracy. Some officials in Moscow drew pleasure from sustaining such illusions among Western partners. However, it became clear even during the presidential election in Russia in June 1996 that Gorbachev had long played his role as a political figure.
I met Gorbachev again in the summer of 2006. I asked him if, as General Secretary, he really believed in what he was saying—in the harmonious development of the world on the basis of “universal human interests.” He replied that the desire to prevent nuclear war had become the guiding principle of world politics. He obviously ignored the fact that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union the world was gripped by intense competition between states and economic corporations. Analysis of contradictions, both in his own country and globally, had clearly never been his strong point—he only hushed them up and smoothed them over. Perhaps he was no less naive than most Soviet citizens in this respect.
Questions of international politics annoyed Gorbachev, and he commented on them with formulaic phrases. But he brightened up when speaking about his work as a HR manager in Stavropol, when, for example, he set up teams of village children to watch cattle rustlers.
When, in March 2014, Russia reincorporated Crimea with military means and through an internationally contested referendum, Gorbachev took it positively. Being the son of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, in his interviews, he welcomed Crime’s “return.” This bewildered his admirers in the West but did not bring back his long-lost popularity in Russia.
A year later, on 9 May 2015, I saw Gorbachev for one last time. It was in Red Square, next to Lenin’s mausoleum, at the military parade marking the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Gorbachev sat on the podium behind members of the government. I saw Sergei Ivanov, the then presidential chief-of-staff, greet him, but there was no cordiality, just a brief handshake and a cold look.
Seven years later, Mikhail Gorbachev died. He died as a tragic figure. There could be no question of nationwide grief over his death. Russian President Vladimir Putin, fulfilling his duty, stood at Gorbachev’s coffin stone-faced. Six months before Gorbachev’s death, the Russian president had ordered the start of a special military operation in Ukraine. This dramatic conflict is the aftermath of the Soviet empire’s collapse. It was not caused by the harmonious “indestructible friendship of peoples” but by geopolitical conflicts between the elites in Kiev and Moscow. The war between the two largest former Soviet republics is a result of the Soviet empire’s disintegration. Its internal development laws had always been a mystery to Gorbachev.
Zhao Huasheng, Professor, Institute of International Studies, Fudan University, Senior Fellow, Beijing Club for International Dialogue
From the perspective of international politics, it can be said that the world as we know it today originated from Gorbachev’s reforms. Gorbachev’s reforms led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of the socialist camp, the end of the Cold War, and the advent of the post-Cold War era. Thus, one era ended and another began, and the world changed its tracks and entered a new cycle that shaped the face of the world today.
Perestroika was not accidental; it arose from strong internal demands. However, this does not mean that reform had to take the exact form of Gorbachev’s perestroika. The course of history is frequently dictated by chance, and Gorbachev was likewise chosen by chance. Before Gorbachev, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had chosen Andropov and Chernenko, and if they had not died of illness, the star of destiny would not have shone on Gorbachev. Consequently, there would have been no Gorbachevian perestroika. In this sense, Gorbachev’s perestroika was also a historical accident. Chernenko, and more so Andropov, would likely have carried out some kind of reform, but it is safe to say that their reforms would have been very different from Gorbachev’s.
Strictly speaking, what Gorbachev carried out was not a reform but a revolution. In Gorbachev’s own words, it was a “revolution from above.” This almost doomed it to failure, because a top-down revolution must have a strong dominant force to ensure that its process does not get out of hand, while Gorbachev had neither the incontestable imperial power of Peter the Great nor the support of a united center. Indeed, the effects provoked by Gorbachev’s reforms soon began to backfire, rapidly paralyzing central power. They undermined Gorbachev’s authority as General Secretary, creating strong opposition from both left and right. There is an even more important question: Could a socialist system such as the Soviet Union, with its large, compartmentalized ethno-administrative structure, carry out an essentially liberal revolution without destroying its political foundations, while also preserving its political framework and realizing its intended goals? One cannot help but put a big question mark over this issue, as to a large extent the revolutionary nature of the reforms contained an inherent contradiction with the goals they aimed to achieve.
The failure of New Thinking was not the result of theoretical errors; in fact, many of the concepts it introduced remain in use, many of the problems it raised still exist, many of its initiatives are still pursued, and the principle that “nuclear war cannot be won and cannot be fought,” which it popularized, is still a widely accepted tenet among nuclear powers. One could argue that the ideal world of New Thinking was utopian, but the meaning of utopia for mankind is not a concrete reality but a world to strive for—a world that may never be fully realized but can always be approached. Overall, New Thinking embodies an idealism that occupies the high ground in the realm of ideas and spirituality, but in the real world, it faces the United States, which values strength and practices realism.
In fact, in international politics, idealism often appears powerless in the face of realism, and Wilson’s idealism after the First World War is a case in point. Humanity cannot do without idealism, but in a world dominated by realism, the realization of idealistic goals seems achievable only through realist means.
