Gorbachev’s leadership redrew the map of Europe

Only a handful of late 20th-century world leaders had a greater impact than Mikhail Gorbachev, who died in Moscow on Tuesday aged 91. US president Ronald Reagan, at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, urged Mr Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, after their first meeting in 1984 at Chequers, recognised they could “do business together”. St John Paul II regarded Mr Gorbachev as “a providential leader” and welcomed him to the Vatican in 1989. They forged diplomatic relations. Mr Gorbachev’s fellow statesmen’s faith in his character was well founded. Around the world, Mr Gorbachev is lionised for the perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) reforms that made Russia a freer, more open country. He is a hero in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other former Soviet outposts for facilitating the freedom they struggled to achieve for many years. In his Russian homeland, however, Mr Gorbachev is blamed for what President Vladimir Putin has denounced as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” – the break-up of the Soviet empire. In the long term, Russian historians may come to a different view.

Destroying the Soviet system was not Mr Gorbachev’s intention when he was chosen as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. Driven by the realism forged during his upbringing in an impoverished village in Russia’s southwest, far from the stultifying, central planning of communism, he sought to improve life for ordinary Russians. As The Moscow Times noted on Wednesday, his home village was collectivised under Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan, a process that claimed the lives of millions of peasants in famine.

Mr Gorbachev’s grandfathers were both sent to Gulag labour camps in the 1930s. Such experiences shaped his rejection of state violence as a means to power. After joining the Communist Party while at high school, he won a prestigious scholarship to Moscow State University, where he achieved top honours in law and met and married the love of his life, Raisa. She died in 1999.

In the 1980s, he strove to breathe vigour into the ramshackle, sclerotic Soviet economy, to remake the oppressive political system and to loosen restrictions on free speech. Bans on long-suppressed books such as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago were lifted. Nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow after six years’ internal exile in Gorky. Thousands of political prisoners were freed.

Perestroika and glasnost broke open the closed, corrupt communist system. But the Soviet economy, already in dire trouble before Mr Gorbachev came to power, struggled under the loosening of centralised control on agriculture and manufacturing.

More than 30 years later, many in Russia continue to blame Mr Gorbachev for the poverty and economic hardship that followed, and for the collapse of the Soviet empire. He is also blamed for tolerating the rise of nationalism in former Soviet republics that led to the end of the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower. To his credit, Mr Gorbachev never tried to rein in the forces he had unleashed, despite ferocious opposition from the communist old guard, which was served loyally at the time by a young KGB colonel, Mr Putin.

Mr Gorbachev’s death, during Mr Putin’s war against Ukraine, waged in defiance of every tenet of international law, comes as Mr Putin is seeking to recreate the Soviet empire in the manner of a modern-day tsar.

In 2014, Mr Gorbachev supported Mr Putin’s annexation of Crimea and said he would have acted the same way. But, presciently, he warned of dire consequences if tensions were not reduced with Ukraine, which banned him for five years for his comments over Crimea.

Across the long term, Mr Gorbachev’s economic reforms, had they been continued by Boris Yeltsin and Mr Putin, would have strengthened Russia. Mr Putin’s belligerent approach precipitated the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty struck by Mr Gorbachev and Reagan in 1987. It did not turn out to be the first step towards nuclear disarmament, as originally hoped. The US withdrew from the treaty in 2019 after Mr Putin’s blatant cheating became intolerable. But 35 years ago, the deal built mutual trust between Mr Gorbachev and Reagan and later with US president George HW Bush. Those hard-built relationships, like that between Mr Gorbachev and Thatcher, helped bring the Cold War to an end, to the advancement of international co-operation and freedom behind what was known, in a different era, as the Iron Curtin.

Mr Gorbachev richly deserved his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for “the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations”. Few of the freedoms or reforms he championed in Russia have survived him, regrettably. But the former Soviet satellite states are forging their way independently and democratically. He made the world safer and opened up opportunities that Russians and others in the Soviet bloc had not known previously. He drew the right lessons from the cracks and failures of the communist system. Mr Gorbachev gave Russians a path to forge a better future. The sadness, for them and the world, is that they have not had the chance to achieve anything like what he had hoped for them.