Mikhail Gorbachev, finally laid to rest, was a great phenomenon. He had class and he changed the course of the world and its history through two epic steps, namely Perestroika and Glasnost – meaning, restructuring and openness. He sought to reform the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) with an open mindset but disintegration was the end result. Once a closed society, the former USSR opened up after seven decades and the steam was released full throttle. Notably, when Gorbachev took charge of the Soviet Union, it was already at a breaking point, its economy in shatters – the first demonstration that Communism as a political system undercut growth. Russia spent much of its economic resources on a military build-up against the United States in the Cold War era. The re-unification of the two Germanys – weak East under Communism and mighty West under Capitalism—in 1990 signalled the dawn of a new era of global cooperation and also a weakening of the Communist empire. A year later, Gorbachev midwifed the final and irrevocable disintegration of the Soviet Union, with the centre-piece Russia left alone.
Gorbachev as one who had worked for agrarian causes in the Communist Party had a deep understanding of the worsening rot within. As the youngest leader ever to lead the Communist party and then head the government, his sharp mind was set on effecting an epic overhaul and granting freedom of expression to a society to which it was anathema for long years. He had in him the grit and determination to change things. Change at that point in the USSR was inevitable. Ronald Reagan’s Star War programme prompted the USSR to invest heavily in a matching air defence shield programme, which hit the already ailing economy hard. There were those who believed Reagan cunningly drove the USSR into this game of competition and finished it off.
Unlike China, the Russia of Gorbachev stood by socialism at its core. Vladimir Putin later dumped the ideology. In the final phase of the USSR, the economic crisis was so bad that shop shelves were empty and even bread production had sharply come down. The old guard in the party turned its ire on Gorbachev and staged a coup, after which the Moscow party chief Boris Yeltsin got people on to the streets and grabbed power. Russians were fed up of Gorbachev even as he grew tall on the world stage. They gave him no more than 6 percent vote when he stood for Presidency in 1996. Yet, in his departure, Gorbachev leaves behind a rich legacy. The world breathed easy after the Cold War ended.
