September 1, 2022 - 4:30pm
For most people alive today, Mikhail Gorbachev’s major role in world history has been largely forgotten. He was a hugely consequential figure, presiding over the winding down of the Cold War and the opening of more conventional diplomatic relations with the West.
I met him in the Great Hall of the Kremlin in 1989. At that time, I was accompanying a large UN-organised group of former heads of governments around the world. Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of Germany, had appointed me advisor to this group, known as the InterAction Council.
We were formally Kremlin guests of Andrei Gromyko, who had become titular head of state as the Soviet Union President. I stood by Helmut Schmidt’s side as we were introduced to Gorbachev: he looked disheveled and incredibly tired as he explained — rather defensively — that he was doing his best in spite of the formidable opposition to all of his proposed reforms.
In late 1990 and early 1991, it became apparent to me that his task was simply too great for one politician. When it appeared as though the USSR was about to collapse, various senior KGB officials spoke to me and other Western officials to offer their personal services (by taking advantage of Russia’s liberalising markets at home and abroad). In fact, the outgoing upper ranks of the St. Petersburg KGB led by Putin were busy setting up trading operations with the world for metals and other resources drawn from remote republics like Kazakhstan.
I remember those final months, as I wrote almost daily briefing papers for President George H.W. Bush and my longtime personal friend Larry Eagleburger, Secretary of State, on the decay in political order. I was even kept informed, and wrote about, various independent military plans for a new power structure. The Russian military units were breaking apart as their generals sought ways to seize power for themselves.
From one day to the next, different Soviet tank divisions and mechanised brigades were moving about, positioning for action against one another. I remember Larry Eagleburger telephoning me to say: “Where are you getting this current, hour by hour, information on what is happening in Moscow? Your information is simply ahead of anything I am seeing!” I told him it was coming from the people within state security who are shaping the Russia to come, abandoning the Russia that was there days before.
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SubscribeOne can imagine in a world without Gorbachev, 1990s Russia would have looked more like 1920s China, dominated by insane drug-addled warlords riding armoured trains and fighting each other in dozens of cliques and alliances. Your average Russian may lament the disaster of the 90s but things could have been far worse.
In some ways the war in Ukraine was a war that Gorbachev suceeded in only delaying. Had a hardliner been in power we’d have talked of a Soviet civil war – the Soviet Union had far more internal stressors and division than China, that would naturally have led to a radically different world now.
Agreed. Those that criticise Gorbachev fail to acknowledge what could have happened if a hard line leader had taken over the Soviet Union in the eighties.