Gorbachev

End of an era? or a beginning of one?

Mikhail Gorbachev died earlier today at the ripe old age of 91. He is somewhat universally venerated in the West for his role in putting an end to a 70 year old murderous charade commonly known as the Soviet Union. He is similarly near universally despised in Russia for the very same reason.

I am not going to rehash his whole biography and, regardless, I owe him a debt of gratitude. He did not mean for the Soviet Union to be broken up, and he spilled some blood in order to try to keep it intact (satellite nations in Europe were allowed to do their own thing, but when Soviet republics tried to separate, he sent in the troops). However, although he did not intend for things to go that way, his actions ultimately ended up with the fall of the Iron Curtain which allowed my family to hightail it out of Soviet Union and land on these very welcoming shores.

His death made me reminisce a bit about our immigration. When we left, it was the end 1991, just a couple of months before Gorbachev resigned and Soviet Union officially fell apart. There was a power struggle there for a bit and Gorbachev essentially admitted that if he tried to stay in power, there would be civil war in a huge country filled with rusty nukes. Once he was gone, Soviet Union split up into 15 separate countries of varying degrees of disfunction. It was a painful process and 1990s were no picnic for damn near everyone in the former Soviet republics, but they did avoid a nuclear civil war.

Now, after 31 years of post-Soviet existence, Putin’s Russia is trying to re-constitute the Evil Empire and, thankfully, failing at it so far. I originally opined that nothing good is going to happen in Russia until the last generation that remembers the Soviet Union (which essentially people my age) dies out. I will continue standing by it, but I may have been more than a little optimistic. It is a really interesting coincidence that Gorbachev passes away the same year Putin embarks on his Ukrainian adventure.

Gorbachev was the last dictator of the Soviet Union. Putin is the first dictator of the post-Soviet era.

One thing I always wondered about was why Gorbachev got a Nobel peace prize, but Reagan did not. If anything, I would think that Reagan had even more to do with bankrupting Soviet economy and pushing it over the edge than Gorbachev did. Gorbachev deserves a ton of praise for recognizing Soviet economic failures for what they were and trying to open up to the West, but it is not all his doing.

My best guess is that the Left wing establishment hated Reagan so much that they could not bring themselves to admit he deserved praise for anything at all. In their minds, it had to be all Gorbachev, a man with whom the American media and academia shared their Marxist and totalitarian beliefs.

But I digress. On this day, I prefer to think about the good that came out of Gorbachev’s actions whether he intended them or not. He was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and he more than earned his place in history.

RIP, Mikhail Sergeevich and Godspeed.