Mikhail Gorbachev Dead at 91

He was arguably the most significant figure of the last quarter of the 20th century.

He was also naive in his dealing with the United States, where he assumed that engaging with the west would result a new cooperative world order.

What he got was NATO expansion, looting that put the elderly on the street, and forced the young to walk the street, and created the oligarchs.

On the plus side, he tried, and maybe someone will eventually succeed:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration. It was not the objective he set himself when he was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist party in March 1985, nor did he predict or plan the way the cold war would end, the haemorrhaging of the Communist party, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany or the break-up of the Soviet Union itself.

What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a process of reform and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to spin out of control. The great facilitator, he carried on, even to the point of resigning with dignity as his power faded away.

In the aftermath of his downfall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the west to sneer at Gorbachev as “just another communist at heart”. He was called a failure because he had not been willing to liberalise state-controlled prices, privatise industry and open the Soviet economy to outside forces as fast as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s rightwing western advisers wanted. He was ridiculed for trying to “reform” communism when he should have recognised that it was dead.

The charges were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they characterised Gorbachev as an ideologue when he was, in fact, one of the great pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only part that was true was that he tried to “reform” life for Russians. He sought to maintain some form of democratic socialism, with a continuing role for government intervention and a foundation of social justice. Compared with the crony capitalism and chaotic collapse of public services that marked the first years of post-communism in Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were a variety of avenues for developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the process should be done gradually was legitimate and honourable.

The world order following the dissolution of the USSR has not been a significant improvement.