It is difficult not to interpret the activity of the last president of the Soviet Union in the light of what Russia has become today and above all of the war that Moscow has been waging in Ukraine for six months now.
In power from 1985 until the end of the USSR in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev did not want his disappearance. He just wanted to humanize and modernize her in an attempt to save her. His two main projects, the volume and the perestrojka, centered on freedoms and economic transformation, aimed to bring out a USSR without totalitarianism. But it was a utopian plan. The bet was lost, to take back the title of a book by Gorbachev’s latest spokesman, Andreij Graciev.
Eventually the Soviet Union imploded, a historic event welcomed by Westerners and European peoples as an unexpected miracle and the bearer of an era of democracy. Yet today many exponents ofhomo sovieticusmen and women forged by decades of communism, share the view expressed in the past by Vladimir Putin that the death of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twenty-first century”.
End of glasnost
Putin became president of the Russian Federation on January 1, 2000, initially presenting himself as the antithesis to Boris Yeltsin, responsible for Russia’s descent into hell. Putin was chosen to heal the country, a task he has accomplished. The Russians were grateful to him.
Later Putin also became the anti-Gorbachev by building an image of a virile and determined former KGB agent and basing the ideological framework of his long reign on the authoritarianism and anti-Westernism of Russia.
Gorbachev left the scene when Putin transformed Russia into an authoritarian power at the antipodes of Russia volume, in a semi-declared war with the West where the main merit of the last president of the USSR was that of having buried the Cold War. The invasion of Ukraine is the culmination of this de facto demolition of Gorbachev’s dream.
The USSR is dead, but Sovietism survived it. Putin uses this sentiment to silence critics on the home front and to impose respect and reverence on what he regards as Russia’s natural sphere of influence. Ukraine and its European temptation have no place in this worldview.
Gorbachev had chosen to allow the former Soviet bloc to emancipate itself and had a project that should have transcended the blocs, that of the “common European home”. Westerners did not follow him, satisfied with having achieved the end of the Cold War and then also the end of the USSR.
It is this misunderstanding, this “fraud” of 1991, which Gorbachev is still criticized today by his Russian critics. For this reason his name is revered in the West but despised in Russia. His death, in the middle of the war in Ukraine, is its definitive symbol.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)