Opinion Death of Mikhail Gorbachev: It is too early to judge Gorbachev’s political legacy

Gorbachev was born to a poor peasant family: He recalled his granddad Andrey and maternal granddad Panteley toiling hard in their wheat field and often eating boiled frogs for dinner. He had worked with his father Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev on the combined harvester for five years. In the 1930s, during the Stalin era, the poor peasants had received land from the state and were happier than before. The poor peasant boy Gorbachev could tread the corridors of higher education in Moscow and rose to the high echelons of the Soviet communist party. He was elected the general secretary of CPSU in 1985.

In the post-Soviet era, everyone discussing the plight of Russia and its Soviet sisters often asked the question of whether the Soviet Union collapsed due to the democratic drugs injected by Gorbachev during his tenure as the GS of the CPSU. To an interviewer who recalled writer Solzhenitsyn accusing Gorbachev of causing the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said: “Well without glasnost he (Solzhenitsyn) would still be living in exile in Vermont chopping wood.”

True, it is not the democratic drug that killed the Soviet Union; but the predecessors who hadn’t been applying it were responsible for its inevitable death. In the first interview after stepping out of the Kremlin walls, Gorbachev was asked if he still called himself a socialist and whether he thought socialism was still a credible project. His answer was: “It is not socialism that has been defeated, but Stalinism disguised as socialism. What has been defeated is a model that levelled everything down and ruled out innovation. I feel that what I participate in is, on the contrary, a collective search for justice, freedom and democracy. Mankind will continue that search, as do movements professing a wide variety of ideals”. He told the same correspondent that the thought and moral authority of people like Andrei Sakharov, the dissident scientist, was very important to him.

At the historical 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, Gorbachev put forward his ideology of peace and argued for global disarmament. He thought the race for weapons was the major reason for nations putting aside pro-people projects. In 1988, he expanded this idea in his speech to the United Nations: “Only together can we put an end to the era of wars. Our common goal must be cooperation, joint creativity, joint development.”

Gorbachev had a special interest in the security and peace of Europe. He stuck to the principles of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe signed in 1990, which laid the foundation for peace architecture immediately after the end of the Cold War. But, he could understand that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the designs of NATO to expand into the European contours will destroy the peace in Europe forever. In 2009, speaking at the Council of Europe, he said, the worst blunder was the decision to expand NATO and turn it into “‘guarantor of security not only in Europe but beyond its borders”.

Gorbachev criticised President Vladimir Putin for his new totalitarian advances and his adherence to the conservative 19th-century religious philosopher Konstantin Leontiev and Ivan Ilyin, who became a fascist during his years in exile.

As he feared, the expansion of NATO ended in the Ukraine-Russia war. Gorbachev had warned the Soviet polity about the threat of environmental destruction caused by human interventions in pursuit of ever-increasing profits. At the time of his departure, the whole world is paying for it.

However, Gorbachev abandoned the communist ethos and could not address the new progressive thinking radicals across the world. Unfortunately, Gorbachev’s legacy is misjudged as a tragedy; it’s a tragedy he could have averted.

Chou En-Lai is said to have replied to President Richard Nixon’s question of how he assessed the French Revolution that it was too soon to judge. It is too early to attempt any final assessment about Gorbachev’s historic political interventions.

The writer is general secretary, the Communist Marxist Party