Today marks the 30th anniversary of the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the end of what had been, for 70 years, the world’s largest country and, for the previous four decades, one of its mutually antagonistic superpowers.

It seemed, at the time, a remarkable example of how quickly an apparently permanent world order could be upended. Gorbachev had just survived an attempted coup, during which he was barricaded in his dacha, while Boris Yeltsin, the Russian President, faced off troops from within the Russian White House. Though they won that stand-off, within a few days, there was no more Communist Party of the USSR (it suspended operations by the end of the month, and was banned that November). By the end of the year, there was no Soviet Union, after Yeltsin, behind Gorbachev’s back, signed the Belavezha Accords that wound it up.

While Gorbachev tried to resist that break-up and regretted it, when he resigned as the first and only President of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, he was able to detail his considerable achievements: abandoning totalitarian rule and the one-party system, the end of the arms race and the Cold War, his introduction of perestroika (restructuring), which attempted to move from a command to a mixed economy, and glasnost (openness), which allowed for free political discussion and increased religious freedom, and in the end undermined his own position.

Gorbachev, unlike his predecessors, enjoyed cordial and constructive relations with Western leaders, notably Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand and Helmut Kohl, and they lauded him. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, something that would have been almost impossible to imagine a decade earlier, when it tended to go to Russians who challenged, rather than led, the regime.

Indeed, a decade earlier practically no one in the West had heard of him; he received his first, passing mention in Time magazine in December 1979. This seems to have been a deliberate policy – for a long time, little was known about his life, even by Russians; he never talked about his background or family and his self-effacement contrasted with the personality cults some of his predecessors had cultivated.

While he started a foundation after leaving office, has been critical of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and, as the leader who withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, was recently critical of the USA’s involvement there, he has made relatively few attempts to court public attention.

Yet the universal consensus three decades ago, and one that I imagine most people over the age of 50 would still hold, was that he was one of the most significant political figures of the second half of the 20th century. The year after he left office, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, which argued (paradoxically, with the kind of dependence on historical inevitability that characterised Marxism) that liberal democracy and free(ish) markets were the final outcome of political processes.

The reforms of Mikhail Sergeyevich’s six years in power were, on this view, an example of a man of destiny imposing the natural and most nearly perfectible order of things. As we all (including Professor Fukuyama) now know, it doesn’t always work out like that and in the case of Russia, quite spectacularly has not.

In any case, there was nothing at all inevitable about Gorbachev’s reforms; the Soviet Union was, on his accession to the post of General Secretary, under the strain that characterises all command economies (exacerbated by an arms race with the USA, a deliberate attempt by Reagan to increase economic pressure) but it still had vast resources and military clout.

There were prominent dissenting voices throughout the Warsaw Pact countries: Andrei Sakharov (whom Gorbachev released from internal exile), Lech Walesa in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, but the Party’s grip on the system still looked unassailable in the mid-1980s. Soviet Weekly, its stooge publication in the UK, was still cluttering up newsstands in student unions with its headlines about record tractor production and the absence of youth unemployment in the workers’ paradise.

As Yeltsin pointed out in his memoirs: “He could have gone on existing just as Brezhnev and Chernenko existed before him… the country’s national resources and the people’s patience would have lasted for the length of his lifetime, long enough for him to have lived out the well-fed and happy life of the leader of a totalitarian state.” Yeltsin candidly admitted he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t done just that.

Since Gorbachev is one of very few Soviet leaders not to have died in office (the others were Malenkov and Krushchev), we should all be grateful that he didn’t. Perhaps the Berlin Wall would have fallen, or the USSR collapsed, without him, but given the transformation he brought about, it’s quite likely that he could have devoted the same energy and political skill simply to preserving his own position, and would today still be the nonagenarian dictator of a nuclear superpower that enslaved and immiserised its own people and threatened those in the West.

It turns out that Russia, and other former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, Azerbaijan and most of the “Stans”, can be very nearly as nasty, corrupt, belligerent and repressive as the USSR was, and much of the criticism levelled at Gorbachev – particularly in Russia – focuses on his failure to provide stability in the transition to a market economy and democracy. But it was the scope and speed of the changes he initiated that, in the early 1990s, deprived him of the opportunity to do so, and led to his departure.

The readiness of some former USSR countries – especially the Baltic states and Ukraine – to break off and embrace the Western model may have shunted him out of office, but the fact that those are the ones that made the greatest success of their post-Soviet existence is evidence that freedom of speech and markets, democracy and détente, the very reforms he envisaged, were the right ones for which to aim.

It would be unreasonable to blame Gorbachev for the oligarchs and despots elsewhere in the former USSR; they are following the antidemocratic and repressive model that he inherited, but bravely and selflessly chose to reject. Millions of people owe him a huge debt for that.

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