‘He died a disillusioned man’: How Gorbachev’s dream of liberal, European Russia failed

euronews.com:

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final president of the Soviet Union, has sparked as much debate and divisions as his actions did during his lifetime.

For most of Europe and the West, the 91-year-old Gorbachev will be remembered for his time at the helm of the waning socialist superpower and for steering it towards a liberal reform agenda. 

For nationalist Russians, he will always be reviled as the culprit for the demise and breakup of their glorious Soviet communist empire.

Elected Soviet leader in March 1985 at 54, the child of Russian and Ukrainian peasants rose from humble beginnings during the Stalinist period to the very top of the Communist Party.

His policies of perestroika, meaning restructuring, and glasnost, meaning openness, led to a thaw between the two main Cold War blocs that had been on the brink of war since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Debates around his legacy are particularly relevant at the current moment when Russia is involved in the invasion of its neighbour — a neighbour whose independence Gorbachev did not interfere with in 1991.

Mikhail Gorbachev eschewed the Soviet Union’s rigidly centralised legacy, aiming to reverse the stagnation experienced during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, and eventually grew wary of communism altogether.

But it was not until the late 1980s that his desire for peace shone through amid major domestic upheaval, especially in the USSR’s member states.

Choosing to let the Iron Curtain fall freely — which paved the way for the independence and democratisation of a number of Europe’s formerly socialist and communist societies — went against the expectations of the West that the Soviets would cling to the rungs of power even through violence, said Professor