View Full Version : Mikhail Gorbachev passes away
Kapitan
08-30-22, 04:01 PM
It’s now reported Mikhail Gorbachev has passed away aged 92
https://www.reuters.com/world/mikhail-gorbachev-who-ended-cold-war-dies-aged-92-agencies-2022-08-30/
My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.RIP
Skybird
08-30-22, 04:14 PM
Bon Voyage. Your life left traces in history. Some Westerners say they were more good than bad, some Russians say they were more bad than good. Germany for its part owes you a bit.
Catfish
08-30-22, 04:19 PM
^ well said.
"After visiting Gorbachev in hospital on June 30, liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet Zvezda:
"He gave us all freedom - but we don't know what to do with it.""
I had hoped Gorbatchev would have been able to change more, for the future of all. But it already was a lot.
Rest in peace.
Platapus
08-30-22, 04:24 PM
He left his mark on the world
He left his mark on the world
Almost as big as the map of Thailand on his noggin. :yep:
Aktungbby
08-30-22, 07:12 PM
I just loved the cartoons: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/-gorbachev-russian_democracy-statue_of_liberty-coups-russian_economy-knin611_low.jpg http://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/ppmsc/07900/07960v.jpg ...too bad it didn't last! Germany for its part owes you a bit. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/gorbachev-42-121122181127-phpapp01/85/50-cartoons-gorbachev-26-320.jpg?cb=1659506993:O:
Jimbuna
08-31-22, 02:44 AM
R I P
Skybird
08-31-22, 09:57 AM
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62062852
But you can also see him like this (from FOCUS):
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Was Gorbachev really guided by "peace and understanding between people," as Annalena Baerbock says? Was he the "great statesman" to whom Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier "bows"? The dripping obituaries border on historical claptrap.
Of course - you don't kick the dead. But the dripping obituaries of the alleged super statesman Mikhail Gorbachev already border on historical misrepresentation. Gorbachev was not only "a great statesman", as the German President says, but first a driven man and in the end a failure.
No, Annalena Baerbock is not right. "Mikhail Gorbachev was guided by peace and understanding between people at fateful moments in our history." No, it wasn't like that: Gorbachev was guided above all by necessity.
When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, his Soviet Union was a hopeless case: far inferior to the West economically, technologically and militarily, highly corrupt, ruled until then by stubborn dictators from old people's homes. A bankrupt country, today one would say: a "failed state," or with Helmut Schmidt: "Upper Volta with nuclear missiles."
The only economic goods that were never in short supply in the largest country in the world were: Gas, oil, and - vodka. The Russians experienced the greatest humiliation after the end of the Soviet Union, and this explains Vladimir Putin's aggression, his unending rage.
The Russians had to watch after the "Wende" how the countries they had under their thumb, the Baltic states that were part of the Soviet Union, the Poles, the Hungarians that they had subjugated, got better and better afterwards. Their citizens became free and - compared to the Russian citizens just across the border - prosperous. The West had won the system competition. And Gorbachev had always wanted to prevent exactly that.
Theo Waigel, along with Helmut Kohl probably the most important architect of German unity, told it again and again, in personal conversations, in his memoirs: Gorbachev had believed that "he could somehow hold the communist system." That, and the Soviet Union as a federation of states. As late as 1991, he was still trying to keep alive the construct held together solely by the violence of the communist clique - with a union treaty that was supposed to function according to the "Sinatra principle." Each Soviet state was to have a right to "my way" - its way to socialism.
But the essential point was, in the unvarnished words of Theo Waigel, most recently in a long interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "He needed Western capital." And that was to alleviate the economic hardship - in the ruling system - to prevent a revolt. That was also the reason for the disarmament that Gorbachev made possible in the first place - but not out of philanthropy, as our foreign minister thinks, but out of sheer economic need.
40 percent - you have to imagine that, the Germans argue about two percent - 40 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product was spent on defense in the mid-1980s. With that, it was living miles beyond its means. One man in particular recognized this - and exploited it mercilessly.
Gorbachev's great opponent was the American president. Ronald Reagan, ridiculed in Germany as a "former actor" and denigrated as a militarist by the peace movement, from which the Greens emerged, countered this not only by rearming NATO with medium-range nuclear missiles, but above all with a gigantic project:
The "Strategic Defense Initiative," or SDI for short. Reagan's "War of the Stars" was the idea of making first the U.S. and then the rest of the Western world invulnerable - through a protective shield against Russian nuclear missiles. What drove peace movements into the streets in Germany drove Gorbachev to despair. He knew that from that point on, his ailing state would no longer be able to keep up.
Thus driven, he proposed what no Russian before him had ever proposed: a gigantic disarmament of the nuclear arsenals. What was then agreed in the mid-1980s between the two great powers, the USSR and the USA, was driven by Gorbachev not out of love for peace but out of fear of state bankruptcy.
This was also the big driver for the withdrawal of the Russians from Afghanistan - which Gorbachev also decreed for two reasons. He had recognized that the conventionally acting Russian army would not be able to win against the freedom-loving Afghan partisans, and: the Afghan war was a single ruble-destroying machine.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan, by the way, refutes the claim, which is again widespread today, that the Ukraine war can be brought to an end solely through negotiations. The war in Afghanistan ended because the Russians left. This possibility for Ukraine is hardly on anyone's mind in the West at the moment (although it was the same for the Americans in Vietnam).
Reunification became perfect when Gorbachev, at a legendary meeting with Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Theo Waigel in the Caucasus, agreed that the reunified Germany would be allowed to join NATO. It was the first eastward expansion of the Western defense alliance, namely to include the territory of the former GDR. And that, too, had to do with money, which Gorbachev needed more than anything else.
350,000 Russians finally left East Germany. Germany spent 17 billion deutschmarks on them. Theo Waigel, the treasurer at the time, still talks about it today, marveling like a little boy, what a "bargain" this deal was that freed the GDR from the Russians. For Gorbachev, however, this had devastating consequences in Russia, which Waigel describes thus:
"Even today, they think Gorbachev is a terrible person there, who sold everything." This also shapes Putin's view of history, who considers the disintegration of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev to be the greatest geostrategic accident that ever happened to Moscow in its history.
Gorbachev wanted to hold the Soviet empire together, in the end even with military force in the Baltic states. He failed. Gorbachev wanted to save socialism with glasnost and perestroika. He failed. Russia's weakness and America's determination - that was Germany's luck.
Postscript:
On Twitter, Ukrainian investigative journalist Danylo Mokryk writes: "Gorbachev sent 100000 people, among them children, to irradiated Kiev - on May 1, 1986. While he concealed the Chernobyl disaster."
Reacting to Mokryk's tweet, Ukrainian Ambassador Andriy Melnyk said, "My wife was one of those poor children. Therefore, no condolences on his death."
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Prison radio reported the death of Mikhail Gorbachev. It was under his rule that the last political prisoners were released in the USSR. The fact that today people like me find out about his death through loudspeakers in their prison cells perfectly characterizes the transformation of my country initiated by this outstanding man. My attitude toward Gorbachev evolved from savage irritation - he was standing in the way of the "radical democrats" I adored - to sad respect. When it turned out that those "radical democrats" were mostly thieves and hypocrites, Gorbachev remained one of the very few who did not use power and opportunities for personal gain and enrichment. He stepped down peacefully and voluntarily, respecting the will of his constituents. This alone is a great feat by the standards of the former USSR. I am sure that his life and history, which were pivotal to the events of the late XX century, will be evaluated far more favorably by posterity than by contemporaries.
My deepest condolences to the family and friends of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1564922977715687424
The Morning Briefing: Lefties Use Gorbachev's Death to Remind Us That They LOVE Commies
By Stephen Kruiser (https://pjmedia.com/columnist/stephen-kruiser) Aug 31, 2022 4:19 AM ET
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who we last heard from when MTV still played music videos, exited this mortal coil yesterday (https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/08/30/breaking-mikhail-s-gorbachev-the-last-communist-leader-of-the-soviet-union-is-dead-at-91-n1625393) and went to the Great Politburo in the Sky.
While I generally consider myself to be well informed I have to admit that I thought Gorby checked out at least twenty years ago. That’s probably because he was a mere footnote to the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Of course, commie-loving American leftists don’t see it that way. Our sister site Twitchy anticipated the lovefest (https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2022/08/30/mikhail-gorbachev-dies-at-91-media-prepare-to-publish-glowing-obituaries-of-man-who-ended-cold-war/) that we’re sure to be subjected to from the mainstream media in the coming days.
Sure, Gorbachev may have been a softie compared to most of his predecessors, but he was still mostly just the unfortunate shmuck who happened to be in power when the United States was blessed with a real president who had no patience for the commie nonsense. The Soviet Union was no doubt headed for doom as soon as old Vlad Lenin decided that its people could be sacrificed on the altar of a global domination pipe dream. Ronald Reagan — with assists from Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II — greatly hastened that doom.
Spencer tells the story at Townhall (https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/08/30/last-leader-of-soviet-evil-empire-mikhail-gorbachev-dies-at-91-n2612446) about Reagan’s defining moment with Gorbachev:
Of the Cold War meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan, one of the most consequential was their October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Soviets likely knew they’d ultimately lose an arms race to the United States and desperately wanted Reagan to kill off America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka Star Wars).
Despite Gorbachev’s attempts to coax Reagan to stop the program with an offered concession for Russia to limit its long-range weapons, Reagan stuck to his guns and refused to budge. In the end, Reagan left Reykjavik without a deal, one of the major examples of his winning “peace through strength” foreign policy.
Reagan was going on his gut with that move, by the way. His advisors were telling him not to do it and to make a deal. SDI used to be roundly mocked by the American left then too. “Star Wars” was an epithet, meant to mock what they thought was Reagan’s cowboy folly.
But of course, it’s Gorbachev who is remembered fondly by the media. The New York Times says (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/world/europe/mikhail-gorbachev-dead.html) that he presided “over the end of the Cold War.”
In reality, Gorbachev was along for a ride that he knew he had to go on. Ronald Reagan was always the driver.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/31/the-morning-briefing-lefties-use-gorbachevs-death-to-remind-us-that-they-love-commies-n1625524?fbclid=IwAR0lPYBr0IvCd20vHbesUwDqQ3Vzkk3f mAz9egLnQpXSGFwy5N1I3-Mw7pw
Jimbuna
08-31-22, 12:52 PM
A man and a child walk through an almost empty Red Square in Moscow, umbrella in hand, snow on the ground. It looks extremely cold - a good day to be inside eating lunch with your family.
As dramatic music plays, the advert cuts to close-up shots of the pair - a troubled-looking man in a black overcoat and cap, and his smiling granddaughter.
Within seconds they reach their destination: a Pizza Hut restaurant located directly in Red Square - the central plaza where so much of Soviet and Russian history is reflected.
But why, 24 years on, is this advert being shared as an era-defining artefact?
Because the man in the black overcoat - the man, in effect, selling American pizza - is Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62736976
Congratulating Gorby for ending the Cold War is like congratulating George III for ending the American Revolution. The choice was forced upon them.
British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore on twitter:
"A decent man & thats high praise for a Russian ruler. (https://twitter.com/simonmontefiore/status/1564719744493789184)"
Mike.
Rockstar
08-31-22, 04:08 PM
Congratulating Gorby for ending the Cold War is like congratulating George III for ending the American Revolution. The choice was forced upon them.
Bingo, He’s no savior granting freedom to Russia and the other 15 states under Soviet control. The Soviet State was a failed state from the revolution until 1991. What Gorbachev did wasn’t meant bring freedom to the masses. It was meant to open the economy to foreign investments but still fully expecting to maintain centralized control over it. All his action did was give those tired of Soviet oppression an opportunity to flee, and run they did abandoning central planning likes rats from a sinking ship. Capitalism killed the Soviet Union and gave people the freedom they never had before.
Bingo, He’s no savior granting freedom to Russia and the other 15 states under Soviet control. The Soviet State was a failed state from the revolution until 1991. What Gorbachev did wasn’t meant bring freedom to the masses. It was meant to open the economy to foreign investments but still fully expecting to maintain centralized control over it. All his action did was give those tired of Soviet oppression an opportunity to flee, abandoning central planning likes rats from a sinking ship.
Yup but leftist revisionism is going to try and turn him into a savior. Look at all the tributes in this thread. Seems to be working.
Unfortunately, it's pretty evident in hindsight that the average Russian didn't know what to do with the freedom handed to them. Any hope that existed was crushed by kleptocracy and criminality in the highest echelons of society and the chaos that ensued. Russia was effectively a failed state in the 90's.
It seems that the Russian people value stability over the chaos inherent in any democratic system. That's what Putin and his cronies promised and, largely, they've delivered it, even at the cost of individual freedoms. We're dealing with a society afflicted with "slavery of the mind", to use a rather "Skybirdian" phrase. If they can't, or don't want to, think for themselves, how can democracy take root?
Mike.:hmmm:
Skybird
08-31-22, 05:09 PM
While I agree to soem degree that "Gorbi" did not act by pure kindness alone and philantropy, two things nevertheless rate as two immense positives. First, I absolutely beleive that he was indeed no ruthless leader who would will a third world war to secure his power, I think he was believable in his attempt to indeed avoid nuclear war. And second, if he had said "No!" to German peaceful reunification - and the freedom of Germany to freely choose its alliance! - German history of the past 33 years would have gone VERY differently.
I do not paint him just in light and glory like many Germans do, nor do I describe him only in malice and coldbloodedness. Light and shadow met in him, and this is what makes him more human than any other Sovjet and Russian leader I could mention. And, in the end, he was a driven being, also acting by necessities. Who wants to call him our for that?
The biggest thing that I would list that speaks against him, was his acting and deciding during the Chernobyl desaster. And it seems in the Ukraine they have not forgotten that, until today.
Unfortunately, it's pretty evident in hindsight that the average Russian didn't know what to do with the freedom handed to them. Any hope that existed was crushed by kleptocracy and criminality in the highest echelons of society and the chaos that ensued. Russia was effectively a failed state in the 90's.
It seems that the Russian people value stability over the chaos inherent in any democratic system. That's what Putin and his cronies promised and, largely, they've delivered it, even at the cost of individual freedoms. We're dealing with a society afflicted with "slavery of the mind", to use a rather "Skybirdian" phrase. If they can't, or don't want to, think for themselves, how can democracy take root?
Mike.:hmmm:
I agree. :up:
Reagan and Bush1 mostly discounted Gorbi as just another Apparatchik when he came to power, when the truth was that he realized how quickly the nuclear warheads and delivery systems were pushing the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. It was just a case of too little, too late.
He defiantly wasn't a Saint , he almost HAD to know that the military was still pushing Chem/Bio programs twenty years after some treaties banned their production and use.
Still, he brought Russia as close to freedom as anyone could.
Rockstar
09-01-22, 02:15 PM
Gorbachev, the same guy who sent Soviet armor paratroopers to Lithuania, Angola and other places in the Soviet Union in an attempt to hold it together? He didn’t give a rats arse about peace and freedom. He simply was caught up in events that spiraled out of his control. He didn’t grant freedom, people took advantage of the weakness and fled the Russian Empire running as far and fast as they could.
I’m aware of only one nation once unified turned right around only a few years later and started kissing the Russian’s arse again.
As they said in the news here
Loved by the West-Hated by the East.
Markus
Rockstar
09-01-22, 05:27 PM
Loved in the west, maybe. But loved by those once under Soviet oppression? I don’t think so.
What do you consider the west? Because I don’t think there is one country formerly under Soviet rule that gives a damn about Gorbachev or Russia. Especially those countries ol’ Gorbachev sent his armies to in order to quell protests and independence movements.
He was just another Russian dictator that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time who lost control and couldn’t do anything about it.
https://www.rferl.org/a/gorbachev-legacy-crackdowns-inaction-empire-intact/32014336.html
Loved in the west, maybe. But loved by those once under Soviet oppression? I don’t think so.
What do you consider the west? Because I don’t think there is one country formerly under Soviet rule that gives a damn about Gorbachev or Russia. Especially those countries ol’ Gorbachev sent his armies to in order to quell protests and independence movements.
He was just another Russian dictator that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and couldn’t anything about it.
https://www.rferl.org/a/gorbachev-legacy-crackdowns-inaction-empire-intact/32014336.html
The West before the Berlin wall was demolished. That is the west they meant.
Markus
Skybird
09-02-22, 05:46 AM
NZZ: The German romanticism regarding Russia
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Life Punishes Those Who Allow Themselves To Be Dazzled - The Germans' Fatal Relationship with Gorbachev and Russia
The uncritical enthusiasm for Gorbachev has contributed a lot to the naive image of Russia in Germany. The Ukraine war and the energy crisis are now shattering some illusions. Will the Germans succeed in overcoming their romanticism about Russia?
The Germans' relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev began with a misunderstanding that continues to shape German - and thus European - policy toward Russia to this day. When the Soviet leader came to East Berlin for the 40th anniversary of the GDR, East Germans demonstrating against the ossified SED regime greeted him with shouts of "Gorbi, Gorbi." The man from Moscow became a figure of light, almost a savior. German-Russian relations never recovered from this.
After the Second World War, the Germans had every reason to feel guilty. They had started the war, deliberately starved the Soviet prisoners of war and waged a barbaric war of extermination. The "living space in the East" was to be created by exterminating the "Slavic subhumans".
Mixed in with the guilt was fear. Nowhere else did so many Wehrmacht soldiers fall as in the Soviet Union. The deaths of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad burned deeply into the collective psyche. Countless German women were victims of rape, which served as an instrument of warfare and targeted humiliation. The Soviet Union was an enemy to be feared. This image received new nourishment during the Cold War.
No wonder, then, that West Germans developed an almost pathological relationship to Russia. The East Germans had a particularly painful history because of the Soviet occupation - which, in contrast to the Allied presence in the West, remained an occupation until the end.
Then came Gorbachev, and with him came the romanticization of relations. Together with Ronald Reagan, he freed the Germans from their nuclear war paranoia. With perestroika and glasnost, he pulled the rug out from under the late Stalinist satraps in East Berlin, Prague and elsewhere, thus contributing to the fall of the Wall.
His admonition to the old guard around Erich Honecker achieved world fame: "He who comes too late is punished by life." Thanks to Gorbachev's generosity (and Helmut Kohl's foresight), the miracle of reunification finally took shape.
Which is worse: fear or transfiguration? In the end, both emotions cloud the view of the other. To this day, the Germans have not been sober in their dealings with Russia. The fact that they made themselves so dependent on Russian energy supplies and were so mistaken about Putin is not least due to the still uncured "Gorbi mania.
In German perception, the "Slavic subhuman" mutated into a model European. Germans quickly forgot that Gorbachev only initiated the reforms of a sclerotic system in order to secure the rule of the Communist Party in the long run. That he failed as a politician, became hostage to amateurish putschists and ultimately gambled away the existence of the Soviet Union, they did not want to admit.
Gorbi remained the Germans' idol. They never understood that although the charismatic Secretary General was a strong personality, his policies were born of weakness. If he had been the leader of an economically strong and domestically stable Soviet Union, he would never have embarked on the transformation of society.
The West misinterpreted Gorbachev's vision of a better Soviet Union as the pursuit of democracy and genuine pluralism. Although the General Secretary had the CPSU's monopoly on power abolished in 1990, he assumed as a matter of course that his party would continue to play the leading role.
This ambivalence resulted in an uncertainty that the Germans, in particular, never wanted to confront: How would Russia behave if it one day returned to its old strength? Would the country seek cooperation with the West in the tradition of Gorbachev or lapse into the old imperialist power politics?
For Germans impregnated with sympathy toward Gorbachev, the answer was clear: Russia would align itself with the West. The "end of history" promised liberal democracy and a fully-fledged market economy in Russia. The Germans believed in this even more fervently than anyone else. The misunderstanding could hardly have been greater.
On this basis, then-Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier developed his vision of a "modernization partnership". Berlin was to help Moscow modernize itself. Steinmeier never understood that the Russian elites were not striving for comprehensive modernization.
This elite wanted national unity and strength, not social openness and pluralism. They wanted all the comforts of capitalism, but at best a "managed democracy. Modernization became a code word for unrestrained enrichment and impunity for all those who saw themselves as supporting the new Russia.
German politicians ignored all the warning signs, although the wind had already begun to change in the mid-1990s. Boris Yeltsin dismissed his pro-Western foreign minister in 1996 and replaced him with a successor who saw nationalism and military might as the natural foundation of Russian foreign policy. From there, it was only a small step to Vladimir Putin's dream of a Soviet renaissance.
The line of tradition from Gorbachev to Putin runs much more directly than Gorbi fans admit. Among other things, the party functionary and the KGB functionary were united by their imperialism. Thus, Gorbachev deployed troops in Georgia and the Baltic States to suppress independence movements. Gorbachev's soldiers used spades and poison gas against demonstrators in Tbilisi. Twenty people were killed - not thousands of civilians as is now the case in Ukraine. So the parallel ends at the sheer scale of Putin's atrocity.
The veneration of Gorbachev contributed much to the fact that the German view of Russia was increasingly determined by wishful thinking. The fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification blinded people to a development that would soon become worrying again.
Gorbachev's undeniably great merits rubbed off on a man like Putin, who never deserved such a leap of faith. Gorbachev was a reliable partner, so his successors had to be as well.
Where does gratitude end and naiveté begin? It was naive to sell the most important gas storage facilities to Russia and at the same time to build the gas supply largely on Russian pipelines. It was naive to believe that mutual dependence cannot be abused unilaterally. And it was naive to fail to recognize that Putin is precisely the man who unscrupulously exploits such blackmail. The current energy crisis shows: Those who allow themselves to be blinded are punished by life.
The blame for Germany's self-deception in its dealings with Russia is usually sought in the historically based guilt complex, i.e. in something negative. That something positive, the honest and almost affectionate respect for "Gorbi," also made its contribution is less obvious, but ultimately no less devastating.
The past six months have been an unexpected crash course in realism for the Germans. The death of their favorite Russian provides another opportunity to draw a line under 30 comfortable years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Germany benefited more than any other country from the end of the bloc confrontation. The frontline state with the second-largest army in NATO turned into a freeloader that broke up the Bundeswehr and delegated its security to the United States.
Now the geopolitical conflicts are returning in a new form. Buzzwords like multilateralism and value-based foreign policy have drastically lost their value. How well the Germans find their way in this world will also be determined by whether they succeed in overcoming the romanticization of their relationship with Russia.
---------------------------------
Bubble Olaf already preps the ground to further travewl on: he recently said it were naive to assume that Europe could move on without Russian imports. The Greens also just admitted that the German "energy transformation" cannot be do ne without massive support by China.
And so the circle closes once again. From one dependency into another. From the frying pan into the fire.
Skybird
09-03-22, 07:10 AM
Germans, and especially Baerbock, should read and understand this. Germany owes him, yes. But not due to his motivation - because what he wanted was very different from what he actually acchieved. And what he accieved in the end was a failure that we Germans benefitted from. Queer, ironic, absurd, surreal. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung has this, the author, Mikhail Shishkin, born in Moscow in 1961, is one of the leading contemporary Russian authors:
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His life was a grandiose misunderstanding - Mikhail Gorbachev's most important cause failed, and the world thanks him.
The West looks at the world-historical figure of Mikhail Gorbachev primarily through a telephoto lens. But it would be important to have a wide-angle lens that also makes the background visible.
To make an exemplary career as an apparatchik in the totalitarian Soviet Union, one needs certain skills. In the bitter power struggle among party comrades, Comrade Mikhail Gorbachev, who came from a collective farm in the Stavropol region, quickly made his 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 to this end was always protection; one only had to remain loyal and useful to the right boss.
For many years his patron was the party bigwig Fyodor Kulakov. After Kulakov's death, Gorbachev inherited Kulakov's party post as CC Secretary for Agriculture in 1978. Then Yuri Andropov, the chief of the secret police, drew him closer. As the youngest member of the Politburo, Gorbachev made his presence felt in the body of old men through radiant health. The general secretaries began to die one by one, and suddenly the devoted builder of communism was given the opportunity to direct the destiny of the Soviet empire.
Logical end
Bad times began then for the Soviet Union - the rotten system was rolling toward its collapse. The decades-long arms race had exhausted the inefficient economy. To save the USSR as such, it was absolutely necessary to end the military confrontation.
The collapse of the non-viable planned mismanagement economy had begun long before Gorbachev. For a short time, collapse was prevented by increasing oil exports as prices rose, but the collapse of oil prices after 1986 led to accelerated destruction of finances and consumption. There was simply no foreign exchange for huge grain imports, so loans were needed in the West. Real socialism came to a logical end, the state could not supply the population with goods for daily use or food, there was nothing.
To save the rotten Soviet model from collapse, something had to be done, and Gorbachev decided on the "perestroika" rescue plan. The goal was to get loans and technology from the West. In return, something attractive had to be offered to the West.
They already had experience from the early seventies, when they could "sell" détente and Jews. In return for permission to emigrate to Israel, the Soviet Union received grain supplies from the USA. Détente ended with the war in Afghanistan.
Now Gorbachev wanted to broker the same deal on a larger scale. First came the nice words on offer that the West wanted to hear: "glasnost," "democratization," "openness," then the political prisoners like Andrei Sakharov. Finally, it had to be something more real. The West had German reunification on its agenda, and Ronald Reagan gave the rate in Berlin: "Tear down this wall!"
Gorbachev kissed Honecker for the last time - with a Judas kiss. Moscow's renunciation of the GDR was supposed to be a piece sacrifice in the game on the European chessboard to win the overall game and overcome the deep economic crisis in the USSR. Now the sesame opened, credits flowed in streams. The head of the Kremlin became "Gorbi." No Russian had ever been so beloved in the West.
The Nato enemy image was hidden in the closet until further notice. The wandering "Forest of Birnam" seemed to be held up in the West, but at home "perestroika" ran off the rails.
My father cries
In Gorbachev's time, when the hard years of hunger were dawning, my father, as a war veteran, was allotted aid packages, including food from Germany. He felt this as a personal humiliation. All their lives he and his comrades had felt victorious, and now they were supposed to eat crumbs from the table of the defeated enemy. When Father first brought us the food ration, he got drunk and shouted, "We have won after all!" Then he got quiet and cried and asked God knows who, but turned to me, "Say, did we win or lose the war?"
For some, perestroika meant above all democratization of the system; for others, the absence of the hand providing order, foreseeable chaos. For their part, the oppressed peoples saw the possibility of leaving the prison. Blood was already flowing at the edges of the empire. In Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, a demonstration was crushed when 100,000 people took to the streets in support of Georgia's withdrawal from the Soviet Union. Soldiers killed protesters with field spades. In Vilnius, during the storming of the Lithuanian television tower, unarmed Lithuanians were partially run over by Soviet Army tanks, and partially shot. The power tried by all means to force the spirit of freedom back into the bottle.
The confused Soviet population strained to survive in chaos. The slogan was "Save yourself if you can." The awakened civil society demanded "European" freedoms and full dismantling of the hated party system at demonstrations in central Moscow.
The magic word perestroika turned life upside down. For me personally, hope returned. I remember how great it was then to see the banned names of shot poets reappear in the magazines. Gorbachev wanted to save the regime, but his slogans of democratization took on a life of their own. He lost control over what was happening in the country.
The political concessions to the West were seen as a betrayal by the majority of the population in his 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 history that was unfolding before our eyes from different shores.
In the West, people followed the "reforms" with hope and enthusiasm. They saw only what they wanted to see. The spreading cult of Gorbachev 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, one no longer needed to be afraid of "those over there.
The prince who kissed the sleeping princess of democracy awake, saved the world from nuclear war and helped the divided Germany to 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. His intentions, however, were in reality other than to dissolve "the prison of nations", to ban the communist party and to introduce true democracy. The colossus was lurching toward collapse, and Gorbachev was determined to prevent it.
Complete bluff
The unity of the Soviet republics was a figment of communist propaganda, and the party leader fell victim to his own lie. On March 17, 1991, he ordered the only popular referendum in Soviet history: "Should the Soviet Union remain as a unified state?" With a resounding "yes," 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 responded. A few months later, the Soviet empire gave up the ghost, 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 over which he ruled, being separated from it by bayonets and referents. Even his one-time chief of protocol, Vladimir Shevchenko, admitted as much: "There was a miscalculation: we did not know our country well enough, we did not 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 2020 masterpiece by Vitaly Mansky, he declares that even at the end of his life he remained a committed communist: "I consider Lenin our god." Gorbachev wanted to modernize his rotten communist empire, but he was a weak dictator: "I was told to let shoot, and I replied that this was not the right way." He considered the disintegration and end of the Soviet Union a coup d'état.
The attempts of Gorbachev as well as of putschists to save the regime failed. Russia at that time got the opportunity to build the democratic social order, but it failed. The mistakes of the democrats of the first hour bear their evil fruits today. There was no "decommunization", no reappraisal of 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 sat 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 restoring the USSR, in whose collapse he felt guilty. We owe the short-lived freedom and geopolitical upheavals of the 1990s to Gorbachev. He was great not in his successes but in his failures.
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Jimbuna
09-03-22, 01:52 PM
Thousands of people in Russia have paid their last respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader who brought the Cold War to a peaceful end.
Many queued for hours to file past his coffin in a historic hall where previous Soviet leaders lay in state.
But the man who oversaw the breakup of the USSR was not given a state funeral.
President Vladimir Putin, who has called the end of the union the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century", did not attend.
The Kremlin's official explanation: No space in his schedule.
As people made their way inside the Columned Hall of the House of Unions, sombre music played - a huge black and white portrait of Mr Gorbachev hanging from the balcony.
The former president lay in an open coffin, flanked by a guard of honour.
His daughter and other family members sat there as people lay flowers. Soon, there was a sea of red carnations.
It was here that Mr Gorbachev's predecessors, Soviet leaders like Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev, lay in state, too.
Many Russians blame Mikhail Gorbachev for launching reforms that caused economic chaos and for letting the Soviet Union fall apart.
But in the streets around the Hall of Unions, long lines of Muscovites - young and old - queued up to pay their respects.
"Gorbachev gave us hope, helped us dream of liberty," Stanislav tells the BBC. "I hope our society is not saying goodbye to liberty."
"This is a farewell to the person who has done his utmost to save the country from authoritarianism, from backwardness," says Olga, a pensioner and long-time Gorbachev fan.
Veteran liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky was among them, saying: "These people came to Gorbachev to say 'Thank you Mr Gorbachev. You gave us a chance, but we lost this chance."
As the former leader's coffin was carried into the Novodevichy Cemetery, heading the funeral procession was his close friend and Nobel peace prize laureate Dmitry Muratov. The journalist held up a portrait of the late Soviet leader.
Lining the path to the grave were an assortment of wreaths - from Mr Gorbachev's family, his comrades, government departments and foreign embassies.
When the coffin was lowered into the grave, a military band played the Russian national anthem and a gun salute rang out in his honour.
He was buried next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62776796
Ask Nikita why in Lenin's name he invited the bishops to a funeral of an atheist.
https://i.postimg.cc/0j5sfhVz/Gorbachev.webp
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