well, my Twitter is full of the most amazing dissonance of views from intelligent coherent people, depending largely on how far East of London they are from. And I can see where they are coming from.
Nevertheless as I replied to one of the strongest critics, I am writing this in a cool little Prague cafe, surrounded mainly by young people, talking about the same things, making the same plans, as their counterparts in London, Amsterdam, or Stockholm. And all of that, including my own presence, is thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev. Absolutely no question.
RIP a true global statesman. Probably the most significant of my lifetime.
which is precisely what infuriates his strongest critics.
MG was still a communist but saw that the way the Soviet Union was being run economically was no longer tenable. As I remember his first reaction to the then still Soviet republics trying to break away was to forcibly make then stay.
A lot of the results of the changes he made, good and bad, were unintentional. The coup to overthrow him by hardliners was crushed by a then unknown Putin. Gorbachev was free but no longer had any power. But the idea of freedom was out of the bottle and most of the rest of eastern Europe took it to a lesser or greater degree.
Would the Soviet Union/Russia gone the way of China or Vietnam if he'd stayed in power IE a communist country with a capitalist economy under centralised control? We'll never know.
MG was still a communist but saw that the way the Soviet Union was being run economically was no longer tenable. As I remember his first reaction to the then still Soviet republics trying to break away was to forcibly make then stay.
A lot of the results of the changes he made, good and bad, were unintentional. The coup to overthrow him by hardliners was crushed by a then unknown Putin. Gorbachev was free but no longer had any power. But the idea of freedom was out of the bottle and most of the rest of eastern Europe took it to a lesser or greater degree.
Would the Soviet Union/Russia gone the way of China or Vietnam if he'd stayed in power IE a communist country with a capitalist economy under centralised control? We'll never know.
But the pizza hut advert was funny and telling.
I’m not sure Gorbachev had the will or stomach to inflict violence enough to remain in control of a communist USSR where the smell of freedom was in the air.
MG was still a communist but saw that the way the Soviet Union was being run economically was no longer tenable. As I remember his first reaction to the then still Soviet republics trying to break away was to forcibly make then stay.
A lot of the results of the changes he made, good and bad, were unintentional. The coup to overthrow him by hardliners was crushed by a then unknown Putin. Gorbachev was free but no longer had any power. But the idea of freedom was out of the bottle and most of the rest of eastern Europe took it to a lesser or greater degree.
Would the Soviet Union/Russia gone the way of China or Vietnam if he'd stayed in power IE a communist country with a capitalist economy under centralised control? We'll never know.
But the pizza hut advert was funny and telling.
I’m not sure Gorbachev had the will or stomach to inflict violence enough to remain in control of a communist USSR where the smell of freedom was in the air.
Moreover he was quoted as saying 'Russia isn't China' - he had to take the Russian people with him first.
MG was still a communist but saw that the way the Soviet Union was being run economically was no longer tenable. As I remember his first reaction to the then still Soviet republics trying to break away was to forcibly make then stay.
A lot of the results of the changes he made, good and bad, were unintentional. The coup to overthrow him by hardliners was crushed by a then unknown Putin. Gorbachev was free but no longer had any power. But the idea of freedom was out of the bottle and most of the rest of eastern Europe took it to a lesser or greater degree.
Would the Soviet Union/Russia gone the way of China or Vietnam if he'd stayed in power IE a communist country with a capitalist economy under centralised control? We'll never know.
But the pizza hut advert was funny and telling.
I’m not sure Gorbachev had the will or stomach to inflict violence enough to remain in control of a communist USSR where the smell of freedom was in the air.
The Soviet army was being beaten up in Afghanistan. It possibly didn't have the morale or equipment to "send the tanks" in as it had in the past.
Spookily I was in Reykjavik today looking at the building where he and Reagan met in 1986. Until recently we could have traced the end of the Cold War back to that meeting. Recent events have reversed that.
He inadvertently oversaw the end of the USSR - it wasn’t his goal or ambition. Despite the rewriting of history he was a Marxist-Leninist to the core, albeit with a broader perspective on international engagement.
We should be grateful that he f*cked up the scourge of communism for a short period at least.
RIP.
Save it for the political area.
Mmm. I’m thinking you might need to reply with the same comment to a number of other posts on this thread as well. Good luck and enjoy.
When Polish leader Jaruzelski banned Solidarity, and detained Walesa, but then was obliged to release him into a state in rebellious turmoil against the communist regime, the huge phenomena was the response of Gorbachev, which was no military response.
In 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in ‘Czechoslovakia’ resistance to Communist authority was met by Russian forces entering those countries, like Putin in Ukraine. However Gorbachev decided not to do the same in Poland, which gave confidence to people like Vaclev Havel in Prague to push for change. In 1977 playwright Tom Stoppard wrote ‘Professional Foul’, a great play exploring football and resistance in Russian dominated Eastern Europe. I think that work of art had some influence. Havel was a playwright. I find it interesting and inspiring that Zelensky in Ukraine has emerged from the creative world. It is no surprise that oppressive regimes are afraid of creativity, look at Ai Wei Wei in China, and of course over here the Tories want to excoriate creative subjects from the school curriculum.
“Phenomenon was”, young Plum, or “phenomena were”. Otherwise excellent.
Spookily I was in Reykjavik today looking at the building where he and Reagan met in 1986. Until recently we could have traced the end of the Cold War back to that meeting. Recent events have reversed that.
He inadvertently oversaw the end of the USSR - it wasn’t his goal or ambition. Despite the rewriting of history he was a Marxist-Leninist to the core, albeit with a broader perspective on international engagement.
We should be grateful that he f*cked up the scourge of communism for a short period at least.
RIP.
Save it for the political area.
Mmm. I’m thinking you might need to reply with the same comment to a number of other posts on this thread as well. Good luck and enjoy.
Don’t see anyone else making the same reference as you so I’ll stick to putting the boot in to you, metaphorically of course.
When Polish leader Jaruzelski banned Solidarity, and detained Walesa, but then was obliged to release him into a state in rebellious turmoil against the communist regime, the huge phenomena was the response of Gorbachev, which was no military response.
In 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in ‘Czechoslovakia’ resistance to Communist authority was met by Russian forces entering those countries, like Putin in Ukraine. However Gorbachev decided not to do the same in Poland, which gave confidence to people like Vaclev Havel in Prague to push for change. In 1977 playwright Tom Stoppard wrote ‘Professional Foul’, a great play exploring football and resistance in Russian dominated Eastern Europe. I think that work of art had some influence. Havel was a playwright. I find it interesting and inspiring that Zelensky in Ukraine has emerged from the creative world. It is no surprise that oppressive regimes are afraid of creativity, look at Ai Wei Wei in China, and of course over here the Tories want to excoriate creative subjects from the school curriculum.
“Phenomenon was”, young Plum, or “phenomena were”. Otherwise excellent.
well, my Twitter is full of the most amazing dissonance of views from intelligent coherent people, depending largely on how far East of London they are from. And I can see where they are coming from.
Nevertheless as I replied to one of the strongest critics, I am writing this in a cool little Prague cafe, surrounded mainly by young people, talking about the same things, making the same plans, as their counterparts in London, Amsterdam, or Stockholm. And all of that, including my own presence, is thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev. Absolutely no question.
RIP a true global statesman. Probably the most significant of my lifetime.
which is precisely what infuriates his strongest critics.
I expect you are referring to Russians living in Russia and supporting the current regime. And of course you'd be right about them and their attitude. However the unexpected reaction, and I'm certainly not the only one to be taken aback, has come from two more constituencies. The first is Russians who got out a long time ago, such as Twitterer Sergej Sumlenny (he may actually be Ukrainian , but anyway is now a German citizen). Such people are definitively anti-Communist, and who can possibly blame them? Then a little further back on the spectrum are people from the Baltic States, for the reasons @Henry Irving alluded to. On Gorbachev's watch there was particularly brutal repression in Lithuania (then, crucially a former Soviet Republic). Here's an example of that, an Estonian commentator I follow, Toomas Hendril Ilves.He thinks that with the glowing obituaries, we from the "big" Western countries demonstrate our gullibility and amnesia. The Czechs however are more nuanced. The current right-dominated coalition has sent a very measured message on his passing. It too has people with a direct dissident lineage and most dissidents are "right-wing" today because again it is a definitively anti- Communist stance. But at the same time they remember that on 17 November 1989, there was no guarantee he wouldn't send the tanks in to Prague. Only with the passing of time did they accept that he was never going to. He'd accepted that CZ/PL/HU were sovereign countries which wanted to turn West.
For anyone interested in the global politics of the period either side of the fall of the Wall, I warmly recommend "Post Wall, post Square" by a German author Kristina Spohr. It is a very balanced, well-researched and confident account. She is especially good on the turmoil that Gorbachev unleashed, not least on himself, and shows that ultimately he wasn't up to containing it - but who would have been?
I used to work with a Russian guy who said despite most outside of Russia quite liking him, inside Russia he was hated.
Because he oversaw the biggest decline in standard of living in the post-war era, worse than the Great Depression in some places. He also oversaw an end to Russian/Soviet expansion and imperialism, and their (arguably inflated) role as a world political leader.
I think he did what he tried to do what he thought was right and noble, and his passing is sad. I think the consequences of what he did are far more complex than what is sometimes presented.
because it was. Russian Communism and imperialism (that's reared its ugly head in the last few years) destroyed many communities and murdered millions and destroyed their economy (Gorbachev was attempting to reverse this). The cold war meant the world was a button push away from oblivion. The only people who think what he did was bad are those brainwashed by modern russian revisionism and/or tankies.
I figured you would chime in on such a completely annodyne statement with something ahisotircal. I have no desire to relitigate the fall of the Soviet Union, nor do I have any desire to defend it, but the complex and mixed view of Gorbachov goes back to the end of the Soviet Union, it is not a new phenomenon. @PragueAddick, as ever, has some good resources and anecdotes above.
Spookily I was in Reykjavik today looking at the building where he and Reagan met in 1986. Until recently we could have traced the end of the Cold War back to that meeting. Recent events have reversed that.
He inadvertently oversaw the end of the USSR - it wasn’t his goal or ambition. Despite the rewriting of history he was a Marxist-Leninist to the core, albeit with a broader perspective on international engagement.
We should be grateful that he f*cked up the scourge of communism for a short period at least.
RIP.
Save it for the political area.
Mmm. I’m thinking you might need to reply with the same comment to a number of other posts on this thread as well. Good luck and enjoy.
Don’t see anyone else making the same reference as you so I’ll stick to putting the boot in to you, metaphorically of course.
There are a thousand ways to interpret the fall of the Soviet Union and the role Gorbachev played in it. For me the most convincing is that he became the accidental hero of the West. A guy who realised the Soviet Union needed reform but was unaware that once he started reform, once he allowed some transparency, he would lose control of the situation. Momentum took over and eventually Yeltsin sniffed his opportunity to place himself at the vanguard of the calls for greater freedoms.
Gorbachev was a wily political operator and had to be in order to survive in the Russian political arena during such a tumultuous period but he never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse. His later, largely failed attempt to keep Ukraine and Belarus tied to Moscow are evident that he still wanted a Union of sorts. Gorbachev had no plans for what came after the end of the USSR, mainly because he never intended it. In the end he was forced into ceding that responsibility to Yeltsin who was uncannily similar to Boris Johnson in his single minded pursuit of power no matter how it could be attained. Like the populist he was, Yeltsin made a name for himself by grandstanding but like Gorbachev, he had no actual plan to stabilise Russia and instead sold off the country's assets to the first bidders, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the FSB (the only outfit that retained any structural rigidity in an anarchic country).
So, in the West we look back on Gorbachev as a hero of liberalism. I'm far from convinced he was anything of the sort. I don't think he was to blame for Russia's subsequent collapse as much as Yeltsin but he certainly opened the doors to the anarchy that was to follow. David Remnick is my favourite commentator on Russia and the fall of the USSR. If you want an insight into how and why Gorbachev is held in such low regard by Russians, you could do worse than reading this article from 1996 - it's long and maybe the final section suffices as a summary but it adds some colour to the real world deprivations that tens of millions suffered post the USSR collapse and how they couldn't help but compare it to the relative stability of the Soviet days. It doesn't matter how we paint the attempted advances in liberalism if the reality on the ground in Russia was a loss of life savings, an increase in criminality, the loss of free education and a struggle to put any food on the table. Gorbachev has to take his share of the blame for causing this abject collapse in living standards but I don't think he ever planned for the USSR to collapse in the first place.
I used to work with a Russian guy who said despite most outside of Russia quite liking him, inside Russia he was hated.
Because he oversaw the biggest decline in standard of living in the post-war era, worse than the Great Depression in some places. He also oversaw an end to Russian/Soviet expansion and imperialism, and their (arguably inflated) role as a world political leader.
I think he did what he tried to do what he thought was right and noble, and his passing is sad. I think the consequences of what he did are far more complex than what is sometimes presented.
because it was. Russian Communism and imperialism (that's reared its ugly head in the last few years) destroyed many communities and murdered millions and destroyed their economy (Gorbachev was attempting to reverse this). The cold war meant the world was a button push away from oblivion. The only people who think what he did was bad are those brainwashed by modern russian revisionism and/or tankies.
I figured you would chime in on such a completely annodyne statement with something ahisotircal. I have no desire to relitigate the fall of the Soviet Union, nor do I have any desire to defend it, but the complex and mixed view of Gorbachov goes back to the end of the Soviet Union, it is not a new phenomenon. @PragueAddick, as ever, has some good resources and anecdotes above.
I have no idea why you’ve just got so defensive lol
I used to work with a Russian guy who said despite most outside of Russia quite liking him, inside Russia he was hated.
Because he oversaw the biggest decline in standard of living in the post-war era, worse than the Great Depression in some places. He also oversaw an end to Russian/Soviet expansion and imperialism, and their (arguably inflated) role as a world political leader.
I think he did what he tried to do what he thought was right and noble, and his passing is sad. I think the consequences of what he did are far more complex than what is sometimes presented.
because it was. Russian Communism and imperialism (that's reared its ugly head in the last few years) destroyed many communities and murdered millions and destroyed their economy (Gorbachev was attempting to reverse this). The cold war meant the world was a button push away from oblivion. The only people who think what he did was bad are those brainwashed by modern russian revisionism and/or tankies.
I figured you would chime in on such a completely annodyne statement with something ahisotircal. I have no desire to relitigate the fall of the Soviet Union, nor do I have any desire to defend it, but the complex and mixed view of Gorbachov goes back to the end of the Soviet Union, it is not a new phenomenon. @PragueAddick, as ever, has some good resources and anecdotes above.
I have no idea why you’ve just got so defensive lol
There are a thousand ways to interpret the fall of the Soviet Union and the role Gorbachev played in it. For me the most convincing is that he became the accidental hero of the West. A guy who realised the Soviet Union needed reform but was unaware that once he started reform, once he allowed some transparency, he would lose control of the situation. Momentum took over and eventually Yeltsin sniffed his opportunity to place himself at the vanguard of the calls for greater freedoms.
Gorbachev was a wily political operator and had to be in order to survive in the Russian political arena during such a tumultuous period but he never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse. His later, largely failed attempt to keep Ukraine and Belarus tied to Moscow are evident that he still wanted a Union of sorts. Gorbachev had no plans for what came after the end of the USSR, mainly because he never intended it. In the end he was forced into ceding that responsibility to Yeltsin who was uncannily similar to Boris Johnson in his single minded pursuit of power no matter how it could be attained. Like the populist he was, Yeltsin made a name for himself by grandstanding but like Gorbachev, he had no actual plan to stabilise Russia and instead sold off the country's assets to the first bidders, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the FSB (the only outfit that retained any structural rigidity in an anarchic country).
So, in the West we look back on Gorbachev as a hero of liberalism. I'm far from convinced he was anything of the sort. I don't think he was to blame for Russia's subsequent collapse as much as Yeltsin but he certainly opened the doors to the anarchy that was to follow. David Remnick is my favourite commentator on Russia and the fall of the USSR. If you want an insight into how and why Gorbachev is held in such low regard by Russians, you could do worse than reading this article from 1996 - it's long and maybe the final section suffices as a summary but it adds some colour to the real world deprivations that tens of millions suffered post the USSR collapse and how they couldn't help but compare it to the relative stability of the Soviet days. It doesn't matter how we paint the attempted advances in liberalism if the reality on the ground in Russia was a loss of life savings, an increase in criminality, the loss of free education and a struggle to put any food on the table. Gorbachev has to take his share of the blame for causing this abject collapse in living standards but I don't think he ever planned for the USSR to collapse in the first place.
There are a thousand ways to interpret the fall of the Soviet Union and the role Gorbachev played in it. For me the most convincing is that he became the accidental hero of the West. A guy who realised the Soviet Union needed reform but was unaware that once he started reform, once he allowed some transparency, he would lose control of the situation. Momentum took over and eventually Yeltsin sniffed his opportunity to place himself at the vanguard of the calls for greater freedoms.
Gorbachev was a wily political operator and had to be in order to survive in the Russian political arena during such a tumultuous period but he never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse. His later, largely failed attempt to keep Ukraine and Belarus tied to Moscow are evident that he still wanted a Union of sorts. Gorbachev had no plans for what came after the end of the USSR, mainly because he never intended it. In the end he was forced into ceding that responsibility to Yeltsin who was uncannily similar to Boris Johnson in his single minded pursuit of power no matter how it could be attained. Like the populist he was, Yeltsin made a name for himself by grandstanding but like Gorbachev, he had no actual plan to stabilise Russia and instead sold off the country's assets to the first bidders, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the FSB (the only outfit that retained any structural rigidity in an anarchic country).
So, in the West we look back on Gorbachev as a hero of liberalism. I'm far from convinced he was anything of the sort. I don't think he was to blame for Russia's subsequent collapse as much as Yeltsin but he certainly opened the doors to the anarchy that was to follow. David Remnick is my favourite commentator on Russia and the fall of the USSR. If you want an insight into how and why Gorbachev is held in such low regard by Russians, you could do worse than reading this article from 1996 - it's long and maybe the final section suffices as a summary but it adds some colour to the real world deprivations that tens of millions suffered post the USSR collapse and how they couldn't help but compare it to the relative stability of the Soviet days. It doesn't matter how we paint the attempted advances in liberalism if the reality on the ground in Russia was a loss of life savings, an increase in criminality, the loss of free education and a struggle to put any food on the table. Gorbachev has to take his share of the blame for causing this abject collapse in living standards but I don't think he ever planned for the USSR to collapse in the first place.
Fantastic post.
There is no doubt that the end of the Soviet Union was great for the Czechs, Romanians, Hungarians etc as Prague Addick notes.
It was also great for the west that could claim “victory” in the Cold War.
You know who it wasn’t great for?
Ordinary Russians.
Their country descended into chaos under the drunken buffoon Yeltsin, ever wondered why the Yanks loved him?
Under the cover of that chaos scumbags like Abramovich et al plundered the wealth of the country and siphoned the money overseas, leaving ordinary Russians on the breadline.
That paved the way for Putin to cast himself as the strong man Russia needed to revive its fortunes.
It all went wrong but how much was his fault? I'd say the drunkard and corrupt Yeltsin was the main issue. Gorbachev didn't want to break up the Soviet Union but wasn't willing to use force on his people who wanted change. He wanted to make them more free within existing structures but this led to them wanting more and they have ended up with a fascist regime - let's face it, it ticks every box. Basically a good man though. RIP.
There's always a risk for any leader that you get seen as something greater than you are abroad as opposed to your own constituency - Johnson is lauded in Ukraine as a staunch ally rather than seen as a philandering serial liar, Blair is a hero in Albania and Kosovo not a smug warmonger - far from their reputations here. The key thing as mentioned above is Gorbachev wouldn't/couldn't hold the Warsaw Pact together by force. Good news for Czechs, Poles, East Germans, Hungarians. He failed to keep the Soviet Union together - the Baltic States, Caucasus and Ukraine were never going to be happy in that situation. But the impact on most former Soviet states of the kleptocracy that followed is enormous and explains Putin. Russian life expectancy dropped by something like 20 years.
It all went wrong but how much was his fault? I'd say the drunkard and corrupt Yeltsin was the main issue. Gorbachev didn't want to break up the Soviet Union but wasn't willing to use force on his people who wanted change. He wanted to make them more free within existing structures but this led to them wanting more and they have ended up with a fascist regime - let's face it, it ticks every box. Basically a good man though. RIP.
I tend to agree with that. There were indeed more measured, dare we say liberal, alternatives to Yeltsin, including the emerging Boris Nemtsov. The problem overall was that Russia wasn’t remotely ready for proper democracy. As I’ve observed here for nearly 30 years, you don’t just suddenly become a democratic country the day after an autocrat falls - and jeez, Czechoslovakia had the best start as it had been a relatively advanced democracy between the wars. Russia had no democratic history whatever.
There is another angle to the post Wall period discussed in the book I mentioned, broadly whether the West could and should have launched something like a Marshall Plan for Russia. I certainly did not like what the West did send to Russia: second-rate “consultants” powered by hard-right ideology rather than proven track records or common sense, who found a new audience even as they and their nonsense were losing ground in the West. Examples: Dominic Cummings, Liam Halligan. They all deserve their share of responsibility for the resulting chaos they unleashed. One reason why it was left to these people, while government stood back, was the unfortunate, to put it mildly, decision of Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. This took George Bush’s eye off the ball for sure. But that said, and based on having seen firsthand what happened in the early days to EU money flowing into countries like this one, I would really have worried that much of a Russian Marshall Plan money would have quickly been plundered by the likes of Abramovich.
There are a thousand ways to interpret the fall of the Soviet Union and the role Gorbachev played in it. For me the most convincing is that he became the accidental hero of the West. A guy who realised the Soviet Union needed reform but was unaware that once he started reform, once he allowed some transparency, he would lose control of the situation. Momentum took over and eventually Yeltsin sniffed his opportunity to place himself at the vanguard of the calls for greater freedoms.
Gorbachev was a wily political operator and had to be in order to survive in the Russian political arena during such a tumultuous period but he never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse. His later, largely failed attempt to keep Ukraine and Belarus tied to Moscow are evident that he still wanted a Union of sorts. Gorbachev had no plans for what came after the end of the USSR, mainly because he never intended it. In the end he was forced into ceding that responsibility to Yeltsin who was uncannily similar to Boris Johnson in his single minded pursuit of power no matter how it could be attained. Like the populist he was, Yeltsin made a name for himself by grandstanding but like Gorbachev, he had no actual plan to stabilise Russia and instead sold off the country's assets to the first bidders, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the FSB (the only outfit that retained any structural rigidity in an anarchic country).
So, in the West we look back on Gorbachev as a hero of liberalism. I'm far from convinced he was anything of the sort. I don't think he was to blame for Russia's subsequent collapse as much as Yeltsin but he certainly opened the doors to the anarchy that was to follow. David Remnick is my favourite commentator on Russia and the fall of the USSR. If you want an insight into how and why Gorbachev is held in such low regard by Russians, you could do worse than reading this article from 1996 - it's long and maybe the final section suffices as a summary but it adds some colour to the real world deprivations that tens of millions suffered post the USSR collapse and how they couldn't help but compare it to the relative stability of the Soviet days. It doesn't matter how we paint the attempted advances in liberalism if the reality on the ground in Russia was a loss of life savings, an increase in criminality, the loss of free education and a struggle to put any food on the table. Gorbachev has to take his share of the blame for causing this abject collapse in living standards but I don't think he ever planned for the USSR to collapse in the first place.
Fantastic post.
There is no doubt that the end of the Soviet Union was great for the Czechs, Romanians, Hungarians etc as Prague Addick notes.
It was also great for the west that could claim “victory” in the Cold War.
You know who it wasn’t great for?
Ordinary Russians.
Their country descended into chaos under the drunken buffoon Yeltsin, ever wondered why the Yanks loved him?
Under the cover of that chaos scumbags like Abramovich et al plundered the wealth of the country and siphoned the money overseas, leaving ordinary Russians on the breadline.
That paved the way for Putin to cast himself as the strong man Russia needed to revive its fortunes.
The rest is history.
I mean, this could just about be said about any russian historical event.
The vacuum created by the failure of Gorbachev to hold it all together allowed those in the already corrupt ruling system to strip bare the country of anything worth anything. Once the totalitarian structure started to crumble the vipers moved in. Gorbachev was not in any position to stop the free for all and the people didn’t know any better. Was he to blame ? In the biggest scheme of things very likely but the communist system was already corrupt. The Russians just got a different kind of corrupt. Putin is the facilitator for the Russian Mafia to control everything. When Putin finally departs for whatever reason there are already individuals vying for the best position to step in. Not much will change although I doubt Putins old style KGB foreign policy will be as front foot if a newer, younger crook takes the reigns.
It all went wrong but how much was his fault? I'd say the drunkard and corrupt Yeltsin was the main issue. Gorbachev didn't want to break up the Soviet Union but wasn't willing to use force on his people who wanted change. He wanted to make them more free within existing structures but this led to them wanting more and they have ended up with a fascist regime - let's face it, it ticks every box. Basically a good man though. RIP.
I tend to agree with that. There were indeed more measured, dare we say liberal, alternatives to Yeltsin, including the emerging Boris Nemtsov. The problem overall was that Russia wasn’t remotely ready for proper democracy. As I’ve observed here for nearly 30 years, you don’t just suddenly become a democratic country the day after an autocrat falls - and jeez, Czechoslovakia had the best start as it had been a relatively advanced democracy between the wars. Russia had no democratic history whatever.
There is another angle to the post Wall period discussed in the book I mentioned, broadly whether the West could and should have launched something like a Marshall Plan for Russia. I certainly did not like what the West did send to Russia: second-rate “consultants” powered by hard-right ideology rather than proven track records or common sense, who found a new audience even as they and their nonsense were losing ground in the West. Examples: Dominic Cummings, Liam Halligan. They all deserve their share of responsibility for the resulting chaos they unleashed. One reason why it was left to these people, while government stood back, was the unfortunate, to put it mildly, decision of Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. This took George Bush’s eye off the ball for sure. But that said, and based on having seen firsthand what happened in the early days to EU money flowing into countries like this one, I would really have worried that much of a Russian Marshall Plan money would have quickly been plundered by the likes of Abramovich.
You make an interesting point about ‘democracy’. Although you use the term ‘proper democracy’. There are quite a few versions of what is loosely called democracy knocking about, quite a few systems of how such stuff is implemented. Maybe the key factor is can a leader(s) be removed by ‘the people’ somehow without bloodshed, rather than is this or that version a ‘proper’ one. The key point is probably that some places have no experience of any kind of democracy, proper or not. China is a powerful example. Many who exist in what they would call democracies look incredulously at a country like China and assume that they are ‘obviously’ bad because they are not ‘democratic’, without considering what has got any country to that point. Even in the so called enlightened west ‘democracy’ seems more like an ongoing process than a fixed phenomena. In the UK it is amazingly less than 100 years since we had the kind of voting system that exists now, and still a ‘party’ like the Greens and UKIP can get shedloads of votes but no seats. That is before considering whether one is voting for a party or an individual. I don’t believe a proper democracy exists anywhere, to me it is easier to describe what is undemocratic than what is democratic.
The observant would have noted the lack of a RIP in the title.
That wasn't accidental
That's a fair point but actually it wasn't a judgement of the man at all and certainly I don't have any contempt for him.
Weirdly, it's a personal whim/oddity that I generally prefer not to say RIP about people I don't know on a personal level. I know when people say RIP, it is a genuine and well intentioned sentiment but it always sticks in my throat...for me anyway, it feels too much like a mawkish appropriation of someone else's heartfelt bereavement. For the same reason I cringe a little at the Seb Lewis song and have never been able to join in. Again, I'm not passing judgement on anyone else singing it (and I'm aware many people who sing it knew him well) but I just feel uneasy singing about 'never letting go' of someone who I literally have no emotional connection to at all on a personal level. In my imagination it turns him into a morbid totem of the Charlton supporter base and that makes me uncomfortable.
There are a thousand ways to interpret the fall of the Soviet Union and the role Gorbachev played in it. For me the most convincing is that he became the accidental hero of the West. A guy who realised the Soviet Union needed reform but was unaware that once he started reform, once he allowed some transparency, he would lose control of the situation. Momentum took over and eventually Yeltsin sniffed his opportunity to place himself at the vanguard of the calls for greater freedoms.
Gorbachev was a wily political operator and had to be in order to survive in the Russian political arena during such a tumultuous period but he never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse. His later, largely failed attempt to keep Ukraine and Belarus tied to Moscow are evident that he still wanted a Union of sorts. Gorbachev had no plans for what came after the end of the USSR, mainly because he never intended it. In the end he was forced into ceding that responsibility to Yeltsin who was uncannily similar to Boris Johnson in his single minded pursuit of power no matter how it could be attained. Like the populist he was, Yeltsin made a name for himself by grandstanding but like Gorbachev, he had no actual plan to stabilise Russia and instead sold off the country's assets to the first bidders, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the FSB (the only outfit that retained any structural rigidity in an anarchic country).
So, in the West we look back on Gorbachev as a hero of liberalism. I'm far from convinced he was anything of the sort. I don't think he was to blame for Russia's subsequent collapse as much as Yeltsin but he certainly opened the doors to the anarchy that was to follow. David Remnick is my favourite commentator on Russia and the fall of the USSR. If you want an insight into how and why Gorbachev is held in such low regard by Russians, you could do worse than reading this article from 1996 - it's long and maybe the final section suffices as a summary but it adds some colour to the real world deprivations that tens of millions suffered post the USSR collapse and how they couldn't help but compare it to the relative stability of the Soviet days. It doesn't matter how we paint the attempted advances in liberalism if the reality on the ground in Russia was a loss of life savings, an increase in criminality, the loss of free education and a struggle to put any food on the table. Gorbachev has to take his share of the blame for causing this abject collapse in living standards but I don't think he ever planned for the USSR to collapse in the first place.
It's easy to judge with the benefit of hindsight but the USSR was ultimately going to hit problems at some stage. I doubt any individual leader could have planned change with the foresight required.
The observant would have noted the lack of a RIP in the title.
That wasn't accidental
That's a fair point but actually it wasn't a judgement of the man at all and certainly I don't have any contempt for him.
Weirdly, it's a personal whim/oddity that I generally prefer not to say RIP about people I don't know on a personal level. I know when people say RIP, it is a genuine and well intentioned sentiment but it always sticks in my throat...for me anyway, it feels too much like a mawkish appropriation of someone else's heartfelt bereavement. For the same reason I cringe a little at the Seb Lewis song and have never been able to join in. Again, I'm not passing judgement on anyone else singing it (and I'm aware many people who sing it knew him well) but I just feel uneasy singing about 'never letting go' of someone who I literally have no emotional connection to at all on a personal level. In my imagination it turns him into a morbid totem of the Charlton supporter base and that makes me uncomfortable.
I was referring to the opening post and title of the thread rather than your post.
The observant would have noted the lack of a RIP in the title.
That wasn't accidental
That's a fair point but actually it wasn't a judgement of the man at all and certainly I don't have any contempt for him.
Weirdly, it's a personal whim/oddity that I generally prefer not to say RIP about people I don't know on a personal level. I know when people say RIP, it is a genuine and well intentioned sentiment but it always sticks in my throat...for me anyway, it feels too much like a mawkish appropriation of someone else's heartfelt bereavement. For the same reason I cringe a little at the Seb Lewis song and have never been able to join in. Again, I'm not passing judgement on anyone else singing it (and I'm aware many people who sing it knew him well) but I just feel uneasy singing about 'never letting go' of someone who I literally have no emotional connection to at all on a personal level. In my imagination it turns him into a morbid totem of the Charlton supporter base and that makes me uncomfortable.
Comments
A lot of the results of the changes he made, good and bad, were unintentional. The coup to overthrow him by hardliners was crushed by a then unknown Putin. Gorbachev was free but no longer had any power. But the idea of freedom was out of the bottle and most of the rest of eastern Europe took it to a lesser or greater degree.
Would the Soviet Union/Russia gone the way of China or Vietnam if he'd stayed in power IE a communist country with a capitalist economy under centralised control? We'll never know.
But the pizza hut advert was funny and telling.
For anyone interested in the global politics of the period either side of the fall of the Wall, I warmly recommend "Post Wall, post Square" by a German author Kristina Spohr. It is a very balanced, well-researched and confident account. She is especially good on the turmoil that Gorbachev unleashed, not least on himself, and shows that ultimately he wasn't up to containing it - but who would have been?
Gorbachev was a wily political operator and had to be in order to survive in the Russian political arena during such a tumultuous period but he never intended for the Soviet Union to collapse. His later, largely failed attempt to keep Ukraine and Belarus tied to Moscow are evident that he still wanted a Union of sorts. Gorbachev had no plans for what came after the end of the USSR, mainly because he never intended it. In the end he was forced into ceding that responsibility to Yeltsin who was uncannily similar to Boris Johnson in his single minded pursuit of power no matter how it could be attained. Like the populist he was, Yeltsin made a name for himself by grandstanding but like Gorbachev, he had no actual plan to stabilise Russia and instead sold off the country's assets to the first bidders, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the FSB (the only outfit that retained any structural rigidity in an anarchic country).
So, in the West we look back on Gorbachev as a hero of liberalism. I'm far from convinced he was anything of the sort. I don't think he was to blame for Russia's subsequent collapse as much as Yeltsin but he certainly opened the doors to the anarchy that was to follow. David Remnick is my favourite commentator on Russia and the fall of the USSR. If you want an insight into how and why Gorbachev is held in such low regard by Russians, you could do worse than reading this article from 1996 - it's long and maybe the final section suffices as a summary but it adds some colour to the real world deprivations that tens of millions suffered post the USSR collapse and how they couldn't help but compare it to the relative stability of the Soviet days. It doesn't matter how we paint the attempted advances in liberalism if the reality on the ground in Russia was a loss of life savings, an increase in criminality, the loss of free education and a struggle to put any food on the table. Gorbachev has to take his share of the blame for causing this abject collapse in living standards but I don't think he ever planned for the USSR to collapse in the first place.
There is no doubt that the end of the Soviet Union was great for the Czechs, Romanians, Hungarians etc as Prague Addick notes.
It was also great for the west that could claim “victory” in the Cold War.
You know who it wasn’t great for?
Ordinary Russians.
Their country descended into chaos under the drunken buffoon Yeltsin, ever wondered why the Yanks loved him?
Under the cover of that chaos scumbags like Abramovich et al plundered the wealth of the country and siphoned the money overseas, leaving ordinary Russians on the breadline.
That paved the way for Putin to cast himself as the strong man Russia needed to revive its fortunes.
The rest is history.
The observant would have noted the lack of a RIP in the title.
That wasn't accidental
There are quite a few versions of what is loosely called democracy knocking about, quite a few systems of how such stuff is implemented.
Maybe the key factor is can a leader(s) be removed by ‘the people’ somehow without bloodshed, rather than is this or that version a ‘proper’ one.
The key point is probably that some places have no experience of any kind of democracy, proper or not.
China is a powerful example. Many who exist in what they would call democracies look incredulously at a country like China and assume that they are ‘obviously’ bad because they are not ‘democratic’, without considering what has got any country to that point.
Even in the so called enlightened west ‘democracy’ seems more like an ongoing process than a fixed phenomena. In the UK it is amazingly less than 100 years since we had the kind of voting system that exists now, and still a ‘party’ like the Greens and UKIP can get shedloads of votes but no seats.
That is before considering whether one is voting for a party or an individual.
I don’t believe a proper democracy exists anywhere, to me it is easier to describe what is undemocratic than what is democratic.
Weirdly, it's a personal whim/oddity that I generally prefer not to say RIP about people I don't know on a personal level. I know when people say RIP, it is a genuine and well intentioned sentiment but it always sticks in my throat...for me anyway, it feels too much like a mawkish appropriation of someone else's heartfelt bereavement. For the same reason I cringe a little at the Seb Lewis song and have never been able to join in. Again, I'm not passing judgement on anyone else singing it (and I'm aware many people who sing it knew him well) but I just feel uneasy singing about 'never letting go' of someone who I literally have no emotional connection to at all on a personal level. In my imagination it turns him into a morbid totem of the Charlton supporter base and that makes me uncomfortable.
Understand where you are coming from though.