For the 90th birthday of the Russian statesman Mikhail Gorbachev
By Volker Strebel
When Mikhail Gorbachev moved to the top of what was then the Soviet Union in 1985, the world public reacted with mixed feelings. Nobody could have imagined that the reform projects he announced would not only fundamentally change his country and Europe, but would also be of global political importance. As a result of his policy, the Cold War had come to an end, as had Soviet rule over Central and Eastern Europe. In productive collaboration with US President George Bush senior, nuclear weapons were not only dismantled but also destroyed for the first time in history in the early 1990s. Mikhail Gorbachev rightly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his historical policy.
The buzzwords “glasnost” (transparency) and “perestroika” (reconstruction), which he and his fellow campaigners adopted at the time, marked a completely new change of direction, but did not contain any program in the narrower sense. However, they brought about a noticeable change at all levels across the country. Never before had the media in the Soviet Union so relentlessly branded mistakes and catastrophes in its own past and present. The release of critical opinions without consequences for their representatives led to a dynamic that was becoming increasingly independent. Since the completely encrusted structures in politics and business had come to an end, but the impulses of the new reform ideas could not create new conditions overnight, the whole country got into a difficult situation.
While the Central and Eastern European states seized the historic opportunity to be able to choose their own path from now on and got rid of the decades-long curator of the Soviet power system, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform and restructuring plans ended against his will in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In repeated accounting reviews, he self-confidently emphasizes that his reform policy in Russia has initiated a profound transformation, which, however, “got stuck halfway”.
In countless lectures, articles, requests to speak and publications, Mikhail Gorbachev has since been promoting a global “new way of thinking” including ecological challenges, populist developments and the dialogical perception of world religious traditions. At the same time, he emphatically regrets that, after the implosion of “real existing socialism”, Western capitalism failed to undergo a profound structural reorganization in order to be prepared for a common future shaping of the world.
Gorbachev rightly pleads for the security of his country, which saw itself “faced with a fait accompli” in the so-called NATO eastward expansion, especially since it was also about “neighbors with whom we share a centuries-old history”. His reference to an “enormous foreign policy memory” of Russia, however, ignores that of its immediate neighbors. The Baltic States and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe knew all too well precisely because of their past experiences why they wanted to belong to the Western Defense Alliance.
It is legitimate for Mikhail Gorbachev to subject US politics in particular to a critical analysis in recent years, but it becomes implausible if he fails to clearly identify the aggressive nature of Russian foreign policy. It had never happened before in Europe that armed soldiers, even without a national badge, as happened on the island of Crimea, occupy the entire region of a sovereign country.
That ideological leap beyond one’s own shadow, which Gorbachev and his reformers made in the late 1980s, seems to have moved a long way off for today’s leading class of Russian “kleptocrature”. Accordingly, economic stagnation, excessive corruption and an adventurous foreign policy characterize the current situation in Russia.
What would be needed again thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War would be a visionary in the Kremlin of the courageous courage of a Mikhail Gorbachev of the late 1980s. The fact that he was rightly admired by the free world for his achievements at the time and that he is regarded as a “traitor” in today’s Russia, who is responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union and who gave “our countries” in Eastern Europe to “the West”, brings up the real problem the current situation without make-up to the point. For Russia, for Europe and for peace in the world.
–
