The final General Secretary of the USSR is internationally hailed as one of the great statesmen of the 20thcentury. After decades of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was a leader willing to cooperate with the West. It was he who drove the move towards nuclear disarmament by publicly decrying the arms race, and eventually convinced President Ronald Reagan to sign the 1987 INF Treaty, imposing limits on both countries’ arsenals of intermediate range weapons. The following year he announced that the Soviet military would be reduced by half a million troops, inspiring further confidence that Soviet Russia was committed to peace. In fact, according to a survey conducted in 1990, the year in which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev even held a higher approval rating than Reagan and George Bush senior among Americans.
The easing of tensions between superpowers is, however, far from his only achievement. His policy of glasnost allowed a freedom of speech and of the press that many in the USSR had not experienced in their lifetime, while encouraging scrutiny of himself and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. For those living in the Eastern bloc, this shift away from totalitarianism invigorated nationalist movements that had been growing in various countries, such as Solidarność (Solidarity), the independent trade union of Poland. Despite the government’s attempts in the early 1980s to crush the movement, Solidarność survived. By 1989 the government had initiated talks with the union, agreeing to the first partially free elections in the country since 1928, in which Solidarność won a phenomenal landslide. An orderly transition towards democracy began.
Poland’s relatively peaceful revolution was mirrored across the satellite states of the USSR, assisted by glasnost, the withdrawal 50,000 troops from Central and Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev’s unwillingness to intervene militarily in these countries. The restoration of democracy to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania in 1989, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of the same year, precipitated the fall of the USSR just two years later. Though Gorbachev never intended the Soviet Union to collapse and used force in Soviet Republics such as Lithuania to try and retain control, the dissolution of the bloc did grant freedom to the states under its direct control.
Legacy in Russia
In Russia itself, however, Gorbachev is a far more divisive figure, whose legacy can be summarised surprisingly effectively by a 1997 advert for Pizza Hut, in which the former President himself stars. As he enters the restaurant in the middle of Moscow with his granddaughter, he is instantly recognised by the other diners, who immediately begin to argue whether he has helped or harmed the Russian people. The older man accuses him of bringing “economic confusion”, “political instability”, and “complete chaos” to the USSR, whereas the younger man praises him for creating “opportunity”, “freedom”, and “hope”. The argument only ceases when an older woman points out that that Gorbachev has brought many things to Russia, “like Pizza Hut”.
The revolutionary nature of Gorbachev’s reforms for the Soviet Union are undeniable. He was unanimously elected to the position of General Secretary by the Politburo, the central committee of the Russian government, in March 1985, at a critical moment for the USSR. Following the death of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko – the third leader to die of natural causes in the space of just three years – the economy was stagnant, productivity was low, and Russia was experiencing a host of worsening social issues. As a comparatively young and dynamic leader at the age of 54, Gorbachev saw the necessity of wide-ranging changes.
Perestroika, or ‘restructuring’ in English, refers to Gorbachev’s attempts to decentralise the economy, allowing a degree of private enterprise and free-market capitalism to operate in the USSR for the first time since Vladimir Lenin’s unsuccessful New Economic Policy of 1922. There were some successes to this policy: Gross National Product grew somewhere between 1.5% and 3% annually during Gorbachev’s time in office, in 1989 the grain harvest was 14% greater than the previous year, and the production of consumer goods was up by 10%. The majority of businesses survived the move to self-sufficiency, and many of them prospered under the looser restrictions.
However, the mild introduction of capitalism came at a cost to many. The strict regulations imposed by the Communist Party before Gorbachev’s rule ensured that both unemployment and inflation were practically non-existent, while the government had heavily subsidised the agricultural sector in order to keep food prices low. But, with producers able to charge more, inflation spiralled. The greater freedom of the press permitted by glasnost in some ways exacerbated this issue, as newspapers reported on climbing prices and potential goods shortages. Those who could afford to consequently panic bought, which in turn caused shortages, particularly of lower-cost versions of particular goods like soap. In fact, so dire was the soap shortage that the 300,000 miners who went on strike in Russia in 1991 listed the product among their demands.
To some Russians, Gorbachev seemed to fatally undermine the USSR, polluting communism through his free-market economic policies and hastening the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which in itself drastically weakened Russia’s place on the world stage. Vladimir Putin lamented in a 2005 speech that he saw the demise of the bloc as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. Similarly, when Gorbachev died less than two weeks ago, the leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party made clear that he mourned less for the former leader than for “the great country that was broken apart by processes of perestroika and the new thinking”. Pizza Hut never released Gorbachev’s advert inside Russia, and for good reason; to see the former president advertising a famous American food chain would only heighten the feeling that he had betrayed Russia by cosying up to the West.
Nevertheless, many Russians remain grateful to Mikhail Gorbachev today. Even now, after Putin has clamped down on free speech by tightening censorship laws and imposing more stringent punishments, particularly against those who denounce the war in Ukraine, Gorbachev’s legacy acts as a kind of buffer against complete totalitarianism. By allowing the 1989 election to become the first free election Russia had experienced in 71 years, Gorbachev paved the way for the multi-party system that still survives in the Russian Federation. Granted, in this first election candidates still had to be members of the Communist Party, but finally multiple candidates ran in each constituency, giving the people a choice between the hardliners who opposed Gorbachev and the more liberal candidates who largely supported him. Although the elections that have taken place under Putin’s regime can hardly be called ‘free and fair’, the ability to choose between candidates and between political parties remains. No longer is there just one permissible political ideology. Supporters of Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption opposition leader who was jailed by Putin, have been vocal since Gorbachev’s death that his legacy is irreversible.
The timing of Gorbachev’s death acts almost as a mirror on the achievements of his life. In the eighties he inspired confidence in a US president to sign the INF treaty; in 2018 another US president withdrew from the treaty due to Russian non-compliance. His policies helped to deescalate tensions and end the Cold War; in an interview with the BBC in 2019 he described the current political climate as “chilly, but still a war”. Through glasnost and democratisation he helped to provide freedom to the people of Central and Eastern Europe; Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has put this freedom into peril. However, even though the progress he made three decades ago seems to have been largely reversed, it has not been totally eradicated. He is still a symbol of hope for many that meaningful cooperation is possible between Russia and the West, and that a totalitarian regime as seen under the USSR cannot be fully imposed on the country today.