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Mikhail Gorbachev – the forgotten hero of history

While the impact of such contemporaries as Nelson Mandela on the events of the 20th century is firmly established in the public mind, the crucial role played the architect of glasnost is in danger of being overlooked
Peter Beaumont
Sat 7 Nov 2009 19.07 EST

At the Brandenburg Gate tomorrow evening in Berlin, one of the defining figures of the last century's history will sit down to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in which he played a key role. In the audience will be Lech Walesa and Hillary Clinton, invited to listen to Daniel Barenboim conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin.But the star guest will be Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier under whose leadership the Cold War in eastern and central Europe was brought to an end.

If a sense of his importance to the events of 1989 is required, it was supplied last week by Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian, who described Gorbachev's "breathtaking renunciation of the use of force" while Soviet leader as "a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history".

Garton Ash's reminder feels long overdue. For there is a conundrum concerning Gorbachev: it is why a living figure of such historic moment appears to have receded so far in our memory in comparison with contemporaries such as Nelson Mandela or Ronald Reagan.

Is it, perhaps, because his momentous experiment ended so inauspiciously with a failed coup, the implosion of the Soviet Union on a wave of nationalist sentiment in the republics and Russia itself, and a resignation that effectively finished his political career? Events that preceded the rise of a voraciously destructive klepto-politics in Russia, so venal that people would come to yearn for the certainties even of Stalin's rule.

Or is it because the world has judged that he has diminished himself with the album of traditional ballads, the adverts for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton, the speaking tours and celebrity galas, the cameo film role in a Wim Wenders film playing – inevitably – himself? Stage antics of an old gunslinger trading on fading memory.

The truth is that Gorbachev meant, and means, more than that.

Not the Gorbachev of now, but the "Gorby" of then: architect of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring) – two Russian words that for a while seemed on every news bulletin. The builder of bridges with the west, renouncer of the Stalinist notions of the use of force, who, through his actions and inactions, changed the world. The man with whom Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could do business.

For while what he attempted for the Soviet Union has crumbled, what has survived has been the legacy of that remarkable year two decades ago when eastern and central Europe were plunged into a series of largely bloodless revolutions against their Warsaw Pact leaders. And Gorbachev did not send in the tanks. But there was more to it than that. In many respects, Gorbachev set the conditions for that year of revolutions, leaving a question to persist: whether it was Gorbachev himself or a more hard to define "Gorbachev effect" that was more significant in influencing the transformations that shook Europe?

Born in Privolnoye, near Stavropol in 1931, Gorbachev's was a remarkable rise. Driving combine harvesters in his teens, he went on to read law at Moscow State University where he met his wife, Raisa. The years that would follow, after he joined the Communist party, were marked by a precocious advance: youngest of the provincial party chiefs; youngest member of the ruling politburo, much of it under the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, chief party ideologue. Despite his conservative outlook, Suslov would inform the development of Gorbachev's later ideas, opposing force except as what he regarded as a last resort – although that definition included the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.

What Gorbachev represented as he rose to power, as Garton Ash noted, was not lost on some of his fellow politburo members, including Andrei Gromyko, the tough and long-serving Soviet foreign minister. Privately, Gromyko nicknamed Gorbachev and his close circle "the Martians" for failing to understand Stalin's hardheaded rules of realpolitik. And Gromyko was not alone. The old guard had backed Gorbachev in the expectation it could control him – and found that it could not.

It was Gorbachev's accession to the position of general secretary of the Communist party in 1985 that finally would unleash the ideas he had already been playing with during his rapid rise to power. It was not defined, as some misunderstood it, by a desire to emulate the west. Far from it. Instead, what he desired was to make more efficient and liberal a party that had lost its way.

Gorbachev quickly grasped the nettle of the war in Afghanistan, reading out letters from the families of dead servicemen at the meeting of the central committee that decided in principle that Soviet forces should be withdrawn. It was not only over Afghanistan that Gorbachev would abandon the old "imperial-revolutionary" basis for his country's foreign policy which he would officially relinquish during 1988.

In this first year, he would also suspend the deployment of SS-20 missiles in Europe and later propose that both the Americans and Russians should cut their nuclear arsenals in half. And it was not only the use of force that Gorbachev was uncomfortable with. "Much of the atmosphere that Stalin created still existed and people were afraid of talking to the government," he explained recently "We said very directly, 'Our people are free to speak their minds, free to write, free to assemble and discuss.' And what glasnost meant was that the entire society was set in motion."

But if Gorbachev was feted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for his "new thinking", the consequences of his transformation of the Soviet republics and his attempts to unthaw the Cold War stand-off was proving far less predictable and easy to manage among the Soviet allies in the Warsaw Pact. Significant was a meeting in 1988 between Helmut Kohl and Gorbachev recounted by diarist Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev's close aide .

"I felt physically we were entering a new world," wrote Chernyaev. "[Gorbachev's] ideas are: freedom of choice, mutual respect of each other's values, balance of interest, renunciation of force in politics, all-European house [against the division of the continent into military blocs], liquidation of nuclear armaments etc. All this, each by itself, is not original or new. What is new is that a person – who came out of a Soviet society conditioned from top to bottom by Stalinism – began to carry out these ideas."

And what is also clear is that despite Gorbachev's desire to improve relations with the west, neither he nor any other figures in the Kremlin had any intention of triggering the revolutions that would occur in 1989. Instead, as some historians have pointed out, what occurred was this. Through his advocacy of "universal values" and his renunciation of old Soviet military doctrine, Gorbachev created the circumstances in which it was impossible for his old eastern European allies to survive. Having done that, his only course of action was to decide whether or not to intervene.

It would be in the midst of the social upheavals the following year in East Germany that Gorbachev would make his most important intervention. In October 1989, visiting the country's leadership for the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, led by the hardliner Erich Honecker, he attempted to encourage him to institute reforms. A month before the wall came down Gorbachev warned him: "Those who are late are punished by life." And Honecker was very late.

But even as 1989 was unfolding, the seeds of Gorbachev's own fall had been sown – the accelerating dissolution of the Soviet Union itself and the implosion of the party which would see hardliners launch an abortive coup against him two years later. Arguably, it was a consequence of Gorbachev's misunderstanding of how glasnost, perestroika and nationalism would fatally combine.

Since then, Gorbachev has hovered on the sidelines, a sometimes bitter observer of the Yeltsin and Putin years, failing in an attempted return to politics in the mid-1990s. He has been a fierce critic of the unfettered capitalism which ruined so many Russians in the Yeltsin era, saying it has convinced him that capitalism needed to be moderated by socialism. The Russia of Putin he described as "a party of bureaucrats and the worst version of the CPSU (the Communist party of the Soviet Union)".

These days, he is often most publicly visible to Britons in unexpected company: popping up in the demi-monde of aristos and socialites that surrounds the former Tatler and now Evening Standard editor Geordie Greig and his patron, the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, often at galas in support of the foundation named after his late wife.

One thing, however, is clear. He might be close to 80, but he is still not ready to give up, as an interviewer discovered early this year when she asked how he saw his place in history. "Don't consign me, he growled, "to history."

The Gorbachev lowdown

Born: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev 2 March 1931 in Stavropol Krai into a peasant family. Studied law at Moscow State University, where he joined the Communist party. Married to Raisa Titarenko, whom he met at university; she died of leukemia in 1999. One daughter.

Best of times: Elected to the politburo in 1979; elected general secretary in 1985. His reshaping of Soviet strategy and his contribution to the end of the Cold War led to his being awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1990.

Worst of times: 1991: the collapse of the Soviet Union and his resignation. 1996: a failed run for the presidency.

What he says: "The market came with the dawn of civilisation and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people, there is no contradiction with socialism."


What they say: "In the opinion of the committee, this peace process, which Gorbachev has contributed so significantly to, opens up new possibilities for the world community to solve its pressing problems across ideological, religious, historical and cultural dividing lines."

The Nobel prize committee, 1990