Пока, Gorby

[Oleg]

It had amazed me that Gorbachev was still alive, as he was living history from a time so long ago. But now he’s gone. At least we still have Kissinger.

 

[ZiprHead]

That explains it all. We gave Russia the worst pizza on the planet then it all went to hell.

 

[laughing dog]

Too bad Kissinger didn't go before Gorbachev.

 

[Jayjay]

If it weren't for double lightning strikes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Soviet Union would still exist. Russia had its chance at freedom, bungled it, but that's not Gorba's fault.

 

[Swammerdami]

From the Trivia Desk:
Michael H. Hart published  The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (revised in 1992), much better reasoned than most similar lists.

Until recently 99 of the 100 people on the list were dead, and only one was alive. Now all 100 are deceased. (Or rather, all 101 since Orville and Wilbur Wright share the #28 slot.)

Hart revised his 1978 List in 1992. Since the List makes guesses at future influence, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung were all demoted in 1992 as the Soviet Empire fell, with Mikhail Gorbachev becoming a new addition in the #95 slot. 1992 was a happy peaceful time, with some optimists hoping Russia would become a democracy. This optimism failed; and Gorbachev would certainly be ousted from the List if Hart were to revise it again. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin may have much more long-term effect on civilization than Gorbachev had.

 

[steve_bank]

He dismantled the Soviet Union which led to Yeltsin and Putin. He did not really change anything.

I don't see what he accomplished.

 

[Jayjay]

He dismantled the Soviet Union which led to Yeltsin and Putin. He did not really change anything.

I don't see what he accomplished.

Tell that to the people living in former SSRs that are now democracies, and all the eastern European countries who managed to wiggle out of Soviet/Russian sphere of influence. Even if Russia itself regressed, the end result is still solidly in the black compared to USSR surviving.

 

[steve_bank]

He dismantled the Soviet Union which led to Yeltsin and Putin. He did not really change anything.

I don't see what he accomplished.

Tell that to the people living in former SSRs that are now democracies, and all the eastern European countries who managed to wiggle out of Soviet/Russian sphere of influence. Even if Russia itself regressed, the end result is still solidly in the black compared to USSR surviving.

At this point calling the former Soviet client states democracies in our sense is a bit of a stretch. Even Poland has taken a turn towards authoritarianism.

Lech Walenza the hero of the Gadansk rebellion turned out to not be a champion of civil rights as we see it.

He wanted gay legislators to stand outside the chamber.

 

[laughing dog]

He dismantled the Soviet Union which led to Yeltsin and Putin. He did not really change anything.

I don't see what he accomplished.

Tell that to the people living in former SSRs that are now democracies, and all the eastern European countries who managed to wiggle out of Soviet/Russian sphere of influence. Even if Russia itself regressed, the end result is still solidly in the black compared to USSR surviving.

At this point calling the former Soviet client states democracies in our sense is a bit of a stretch. Even Poland has taken a turn towards authoritarianism.

The US turned towards authoritarianism with Trump. Are we no longer a democratic republic?

Lech Walenza the hero of the Gadansk rebellion turned out to not be a champion of civil rights as we see it.

He wanted gay legislators to stand outside the chamber.

So? You think there are not US politicians who feel the same way?

 

[bilby]

At this point calling the former Soviet client states democracies in our sense is a bit of a stretch.

What, even the former East Germany?

I suspect that the people of Berlin don't see Gorbachev's influence as minor or trivial.

 

[lpetrich]

The International Non-Govermental foundation for socio-economic and political studies (The Gorbachev Foundation) has only this: 2.III.1931 — 30.VIII.2022

It's day.month.year, with the month in Roman numerals.

I remember trying to e-mail from that site, only for that e-mail to bounce.

I expressed my deep gratitude to him for ending the Cold War in such a peaceful fashion. He ended up sacrificing his career, but he did the right thing, like Fredrik Willem de Klerk of South Africa at the same time, and very recently, Liz Cheney of the US state of Wyoming.

MG and FWdK looked much alike back then: balding middle-aged men, though unlike MG, FWdK had no birthmarks on his head. LC is a woman with a full head of hair, but she's also middle-aged.

It made me so happy to see the Soviet bloc go free, especially after the Soviet Union's history of imposing its will on those nations: Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980. Yugoslavia broke free of the Soviet bloc not long after WWII because of that. Stalin reportedly said about it 'I will shake my little finger—and there will be no more Tito. He will fall.' but he did nothing further. That was Josip Broz Tito, the long-time Communist leader of Yugoslavia.

I remember the last years of the Soviet Union. Its leadership was old and stuck in its ways. Leonid Brezhnev seemed very feeble in his last years. I remember hoping that his successor Yuri Andropov would be a more forceful leader, but he spent his leadership days very ill. Some official called it a "bad cold", but it was much worse than that. He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, some Party-leadership nobody, and then by Mikhail Gorbachev, who was much younger. He decreed glasnost "openness" and perestroika "reconstruction", but that was not very successful. But he deserves credit for helping the Soviet Union come to a graceful end.

1989 was a very good year for me, watching the six Soviet-bloc countries go free: Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. It was mostly peaceful, except in Romania, where the regime got violent against protesters and where the military deposed long-time Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu.

This was followed by the reunification of Germany, something that seemed to me like West Germany annexing East Germany.

The Soviet leadership tried to hold onto the Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, for a little longer, but in mid-1991, let them go free.

When Mikhail Gorbachev went on vacation in August of that year, some Soviet hardliners attempted a coup against him. That coup was beaten off under the leadership of Russian Republic president Boris Yeltsin, and MG looked weak as a leader. Late that year, the leaders of the three Slavic republics, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, despite MG's protests that that was an "unconstitutional coup". When the remaining Soviet republics ratified this dissolution, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and with it, MG's position.

 

[lpetrich]

While Mikhail Gorbachev has been very much appreciated in the West, in Russia, however, he is remembered as having presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev, Who Oversaw the End of the Soviet Union, Is Dead at 91 - The New York Times - "Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R."

He died of some unspecified “long and grave illness.”

When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.

A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.

The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | Mikhail Gorbachev’s True Legacy - The New York Times

Back in the old Soviet Union, the political joke was the principal underground conduit of political opinion. One that made the rounds soon after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 posed this question: “Who supports Gorbachev in the Politburo?” The answer: “Nobody has to. He can move around on his own.”

The rise of a dynamic, young and charismatic leader after a series of funerals of doddering old leaders — Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko — was in itself an exciting novelty. Couple that with the radical openness, candor and willingness to change that Mr. Gorbachev introduced almost from the first day, and the euphoria was tangible across the entire Soviet expanse.

Mr. Gorbachev died on Tuesday, and it would be hard to find a Russian today who would remember him positively, much less in the brave and heroic way in which he is often perceived in the West. To those, like Vladimir Putin, who pine for lost empire, he was the man who destroyed the mighty Soviet state. To liberals, he was the leader who failed to set its successor in the right direction.

But in those first heady days of his leadership, Mr. Gorbachev, who at 54 was decades younger than most of the senile relics around him in the Politburo, was a global rock star. The Soviet Union was near rock bottom. Store shelves were empty, the economy wrung dry by a rapacious military machine. An army of K.G.B. agents and informers brutally crushed any public deviation from the official ideology, in which nobody believed. The outside world was a forbidden dream.

Author Serge Schmemann notes about the fall of the Berlin Wall, "A popular myth in the United States credits Ronald Reagan with that historic event, but the forces that Mr. Gorbachev unleashed throughout East Europe were immeasurably more important."

I agree that MG deserves much more credit than RR, if RR deserves any at all.

I also note that Rush Limbaugh ridiculed "Gorbasms" for a while.

In retrospect, it is intriguing to question whether things could have gone differently or whether the Soviet Union could have survived had Mr. Gorbachev taken different actions. China, which crushed the liberalizing forces set loose by Mr. Gorbachev in Tiananmen Square, suggests an alternative route.

Having witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet empire from Moscow and then from Berlin, I find it hard to imagine that an agent of change other than Mr. Gorbachev could have achieved the peaceful dismantling of a system that had all but collapsed. It took a believing Communist to try to change the system from within, but the system was beyond reviving.

Which is all the more reason to appreciate his actions. Even though like F.W. de Klerk and Liz Cheney, he paid with his career.

 

[lpetrich]

With War in Ukraine, Putin Tries to Unravel Gorbachev’s Legacy - The New York Times

President Vladimir V. Putin calls the end of the Soviet Union a “genuine tragedy” for Russia, and he blamed Mikhail S. Gorbachev for bending to the demands of a treacherous and duplicitous West.

An evil empire.

“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Mr. Putin intoned, referring to the Soviet Union’s collapse. “We lost confidence for only one moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world.”

For Mr. Putin, the end of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” a “genuine tragedy” for millions of Russians because it left them scattered across newly formed national borders. The disaster was caused, in Mr. Putin’s telling, by the weak nerves of a leader too willing to bend to the demands of a treacherous and duplicitous West — a mistake, the Kremlin’s televised propaganda now often reminds viewers, that Mr. Putin is determined not to repeat.

... But Mr. Putin’s battle to reverse Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy extends beyond territorial control to the personal and political freedoms that the last Soviet president ushered in — and that the Kremlin is now fast unraveling.

“All of Gorbachev’s reforms are now zero, in ashes, in smoke,” a friend of Mr. Gorbachev’s, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview. “This was his life’s work.”

Mr. Gorbachev, who has died at age 91, was still in power when Mr. Venediktov’s freewheeling liberal radio station, Echo of Moscow, first went on the air in 1990 and came to symbolize Russia’s newfound freedoms. After Mr. Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February, the Kremlin forced the station to shut down.

And Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper that Mr. Gorbachev used his Nobel Peace Prize money to help found in the early 1990s, was forced to suspend publication in March, threatened by a new wartime censorship law.

However, MG seemed to share Vladimir Putin's belief that Russia and Ukraine belong in the same nation.

But Mr. Gorbachev, the son of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, backed Mr. Putin’s view of Ukraine as a “brotherly nation” that should rightfully be in Russia’s orbit. He supported Mr. Putin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, describing the move as representing the will of a region heavily populated by people who identified as Russian. And he castigated the West for “trying to draw Ukraine into NATO,” warning that such attempts “will not bring anything but discord between Ukraine and Russia.”

 

[Derec]

Too bad Kissinger didn't go before Gorbachev.

Why? What has he done to you?

I just looked up his age. 99 years old. I guess power is not just the ultimate aphrodisiac, but also an elixir of youth.

 

[laughing dog]

Too bad Kissinger didn't go before Gorbachev.

Why? What has he done to you?

Nothing personally. But his role in the secret bombings in Cambodia places is pretty disgusting.

 

[bleubird]

Too bad Kissinger didn't go before Gorbachev.

Why? What has he done to you?

Nothing personally. But his role in the secret bombings in Cambodia places is pretty disgusting.

And his part in USA involvement in South america.

 

[lpetrich]

Some more from the article about Putin unraveling Gorbachev's legacy.

Mr. Gorbachev insisted that he was not trying to bring down the Soviet Union, but to reform it from the inside. He freed political prisoners, lifted restrictions on banned books and films, and warned Communist leaders in East Germany not to use force against their own people even as the country was slipping out of Moscow’s grasp. But by the time he resigned, politically weakened, in December 1991, sealing the end of the Soviet Union, the centrifugal forces tearing the empire apart had spun out of his control.

Now the Kremlin points to Mr. Gorbachev’s tenure as a cautionary tale of the danger of liberal ideals. And beyond his assertive foreign policy, Mr. Putin has been busy bringing back Soviet-style repression, with the invasion of Ukraine touching off a new campaign against activists, cultural figures and even social-media influencers critical of the government.

Mr. Putin has also been working to burnish the image of the Soviet Union, glorifying its military might and cracking down on scholars of the crimes of its secret police.

Looking back to the Soviet Union as some Good Old Days.

I recall someone pointing out the difference between the Soviet Union and Putinism. The Soviet Union presented itself as building a new society with lots of good new things, while Vladimir Putin wants to restore previous glories.

 

[Oleg]

Some more from the article about Putin unraveling Gorbachev's legacy.

Mr. Gorbachev insisted that he was not trying to bring down the Soviet Union, but to reform it from the inside. He freed political prisoners, lifted restrictions on banned books and films, and warned Communist leaders in East Germany not to use force against their own people even as the country was slipping out of Moscow’s grasp. But by the time he resigned, politically weakened, in December 1991, sealing the end of the Soviet Union, the centrifugal forces tearing the empire apart had spun out of his control.

Now the Kremlin points to Mr. Gorbachev’s tenure as a cautionary tale of the danger of liberal ideals. And beyond his assertive foreign policy, Mr. Putin has been busy bringing back Soviet-style repression, with the invasion of Ukraine touching off a new campaign against activists, cultural figures and even social-media influencers critical of the government.

Mr. Putin has also been working to burnish the image of the Soviet Union, glorifying its military might and cracking down on scholars of the crimes of its secret police.

Looking back to the Soviet Union as some Good Old Days.

I recall someone pointing out the difference between the Soviet Union and Putinism. The Soviet Union presented itself as building a new society with lots of good new things, while Vladimir Putin wants to restore previous glories.

Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains. - Putin

 

[Oleg]

The Soviet Union might have been reformed under Gorbachev, but this man and his trip to the store set the end in motion.