Mikhail Gorbachev died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Though politically sidelined for the last few decades of his life, for a little more than six years — from March 1985 to December 1991— it mattered that it was Gorbachev who headed the USSR, and not another. And for one of those years —mid-1989 to mid-1990 when the Iron Curtain fell — it mattered most of all. Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did and, perhaps more importantly, for what he did not do during that time period.
I was a junior professor of national security and international relations during that fateful time period. None in my profession predicted that the Cold War would, or even could, end. If you had predicted that the Warsaw Pact alliance would vanish in the space of a few months, that the U.S. and USSR would ban entire classes of nuclear weapons and take all the rest off alert status, and that East and West Germany would not only be reunited but become a member of NATO, and that most Soviet republics would become independent countries, we would have accused you of recreational drug use.
To the end of my days, I will never forget the photo on the front page of The New York Times in 1991 showing the leaders of the Warsaw Pact, seated in a circle, raising their hands to vote to disband that dreaded alliance. I kept that front page for many years as a testimony of the power of human beings to break through all that had seemed impregnable just a moment before. Indeed, at Texas A&M University, where I work, there is what I consider to be “the” statue that captures the heady feeling of those days, Verl Goodnight’s “The Day the Wall Came Down,” which shows horses jumping over a collapsing Berlin Wall.
Of course, it is true that George H.W. Bush was also instrumental in navigating that incredible year, which is why the statue rightly stands outside his presidential library. Arguably, the unique qualities of each man were perfectly matched and equally needed at that precise moment in history. But it was Gorbachev’s actions that represented the greater departure from all that had gone before in the USSR, and so evinced perhaps a greater courage.
In a strange twist of fate, it was Joseph Stalin that created Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s home region of Stavropol suffered greatly under Stalin’s purposeful famines and his grandfathers were imprisoned by Stalin’s regime. Gorbachev referred to himself as a “child of the 20th Congress” where Nikita Khrushchev’s secret denunciation of Stalin took place. Little did the gerontocracy of the Politburo understand that Gorbachev would bring an end to the sclerotic system Stalin had set in place, freeing dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and bringing multiparty elections to the country.
The heyday was much too short, however. In my own personal view, while Bush deserved Russia’s trust, those U.S. leaders that followed him did not. There were broken promises concerning NATO, and also catastrophic damage wrought to the Soviet economy through a combination of Gorbachev successor Boris Yeltsin’s corruption, plus the ignorance, or perhaps even rapacity, of the Western economists who administered the “shock treatment” that turned Russia from a command economy to a capitalist economy. These bear much of the blame for the souring of what might have been. In the same way that Stalin created Gorbachev, it was Yeltsin — and arguably the West — who created Vladimir Putin, who says he’s too busy to attend Gorbachev’s funeral on Saturday.
For those who wept with joy in 1989, 1990 and 1991, it is a hard thing to see Gorbachev’s greatest achievements, such as the INF Treaty, abandoned without a backward glance. To this day, Gorbachev is vilified by many Russians as a traitor to his people. Hearing of his death, one person reportedly said, “Ancient wisdom says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Mikhail Gorbachev can serve as an illustration that the good intentions of a national leader are capable of causing hell on earth for an entire country.”
Another Russian remarked online, “He is finally gone, the filthy carrion. So many corpses and destroyed destinies ... not even Stalin had so many.”
But what is the true measure of a great leader? I submit a great leader is the man or woman who, standing at the precipice of crisis, thinks not only of his or her own nation, but of all humankind.
As democratic movements swept across Eastern Europe, Gorbachev could have applied the longstanding Brezhnev Doctrine, which called for the use of military force to quash them. But he did not. Later, he explained, “If the Soviet Union had wished, there would have been nothing of the sort and no German unification. But what would have happened? A catastrophe or World War III.”
Rather than acquiesce to the tragic straitjacket of great power politics, Gorbachev declined the logic of pride and death in favor of life and freedom. In this, he was surely a great leader. As Russian economist Ruslan Grinberg put it, “He gave us all freedom — but we didn’t know what to do with it.”
In 1992, Gorbachev said, “I am often asked, would I have started it all again if I had to repeat it? Yes, indeed. And with more persistence and determination.” Bless him for that. I can only imagine that Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush are having a joyous reunion, despite the heartbreaking shadow of what might have been.
Valerie M. Hudson is a university distinguished professor at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and a Deseret News contributor. Her views are her own.