In 1994, when I arrived in Moscow as a correspondent for L'Unità, just a few weeks before Yeltsin sent tanks to Grozny, to start a war on the Chechens that only Putin, after more than ten years, managed to conclude. Mikhail Sergeivic Gorbachev it was already the past.
Only three years had passed since the red flag had been lowered by the Kremlin and he had been forced to resign into the hands of his main opponent, Boris Yeltsin exactly, but for the Russians it no longer existed. And if you really insisted on asking some questions about his role in the country and in the world, they answered you in a low voice, reluctantly and as if you were talking about the person who had caused the greatest misfortune that had ever happened to Russia.
Gorbachev: loved abroad, criticized at home
We had the proof in 1996, when Gorbachev tried to return to the political scene: he won less than 1% of the votes in the elections. No, the man who had buried the communism and the first socialist state in history was not loved at home. And it couldn't be: because of him the Soviet Empire no longer existed and the Russians were impoverished, humiliated, laughed at.
Glasnost? Perestroika? Western stuff. Because the end of censorship, the right to demonstrate, the publication of "forbidden" books and newspapers, were all good things, but they didn't produce well-being. And even the restructuring of the economy had led to nothing since the partial reforms and the timid openings to the market.
Yet, never once had Gorbachev regretted what he had done.
His dream of peace betrayed by Putin's Russia
"Life punishes those who arrive late," he told Erich Honecker, leader of the GDR, East Germany, while the Germans ran to embrace each other on both sides of the Wall. Because Gorby, as all of us Westerners called him, was seriously convinced that the aspirations of freedom could not be compressed forever. And that therefore Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and East Germans had the right to a political life outside the Soviet Union.
And so what? Why did it all go wrong?
He said it himself: he never would have expected that after the end of the Cold War Western leaders, starting with the Americans, would not have seized the opportunity to rebuild a new security architecture in Europe and in the world. After all, the "enemy" was gone, wouldn't it have been easy?
It is only this that he has complained about all these years: Russia had returned to Europe, why was it not welcomed? And in recent times he has more than once judged Putin's revanchism as the son of Great Humiliation of Russia XNUMXs. An analysis, however, not a justification: because, as is evident, unlike the current president, he had withdrawn the guns and soldiers from the borders, he had not sent them.
Could it have been different? Inadmissible question, as always in history when one imagines what could have happened if…
Gorby and the daring design of a "common European home"
He, Gorbachev, has always thought and said publicly that as far as Russia was concerned, no, it couldn't be done otherwise. The communist economic system set up after the Revolution of 1917 and above all in the following years, it had failed in comparison with the capitalist one, the arms race, finally, had completely brought it to its knees. Just give it a push and everything would collapse.
Of course, the Chinese way had been another and is still there, to demonstrate that one can continue to call oneself "communist" and follow the laws of the market. Why didn't Gorbachev not follow her? Why Gorby was a European Russian, was imbued with the ideals of the French Revolution as well as that of October, and because he dreamed of a destiny and a path for "his" Russians mixed with that of the French, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Greeks, etc.
Gorby's arrival in the Kremlin
It is possible that it was not so clear to him on March 11, 1985 when he found himself at the head of the Pcus, happening to Konstantin Chernenko, the last of the gerontocrats, who in turn succeeded Andropov, and he succeeded Brezhnev. He had been right Andropov, powerful head of the KGB before arriving at the Kremlin, to suggest the name of Gorbachev, but he had had to wait another turn, just over 50 years old, he was too young for the Soviet nomenklatura.
His career up to that point had all taken place in his native Stavropol region, not far from the Crimea.
His arrival in the Kremlin is an authentic revolution in the habits of a leader of the CPSU: he appears in public with the wife Raissa, travel the country to collect everyone's opinions, meet thousands of people.
He says new things, such as that Russia needed to "accelerate" to recover the lost ground against the West and that the Russians must start breathing again.
Gorbachev's Perestroika: A Plan for the Impossible Reform of Communism
To do this, Gorbachev implants Perestroika, which essentially means abandonment of egalitarianism, tie wages to work, boost productivity. Until then the norm had been this: a Russian citizen was followed by the state from the cradle to the grave. Of course, there was always someone "more equal than the others", specifically Party members, but roughly everyone was assisted: from kindergarten, to university, to work. With the new laws, responsibility for one's life returned to the individual, if not completely, at least in part. It is clear that this could displease someone (many) after 70 years of total delegation: you don't learn to take your life into your own hands overnight.
At the same time Gorbachev also transforms domestic politics. Reformers such as Eduard Shevardnadze which he puts in Foreign Affairs in the place of Andrej Gromiko, who survived the times of Stalin. While a kind of internal "current" is activated in the PCUS, the Democratic Platform, until arriving, in 1990, at the abolition of article 6 of the Constitution which established the leading role of the Party in the country.
In the meantime, the world is looking at Russia with different eyes: is it another "thaw" like that of Khrushchev in 1956? Or something different?
From Gorbachev to Yeltsin: the end of the USSR
The first to show faith in this strange communist is Margaret Thatcher. “We can work together,” she concedes. Reagan it takes a little longer, but then the agreements on the limitation of nuclear warheads and the one on intercontinental missiles arrive.
But Gorby's time is over: at home the resistance of the nomenklatura is very strong and he, instead of insisting on the path of reforms, as Yeltsin and Shevardnadze are asking him, starts to slow down. The program of the five hundred days of the young economist Grigory Yavlinsky, which aims to bring Russia into the market economy, is abandoned in favor of a much more moderate program, implemented after the attacks by the conservatives. There monetary reform instead it leads to hoardings in shops with the consequence of endless queues to get some sausage, some sugar, soap, cigarettes. While the campaign against vodka definitively alienates the sympathy of the people.
Start like this the rise of Boris Yeltsin that after being torpedoed by the leadership of the CPSU he is triumphantly elected to the presidency of the Supreme Soviet, Parliament.
In the meantime, the Empire is crumbling abroad.
1989 is the fateful year: the Poland, with the victory of Solidarnosc; then the borders of Hungary are opened; December 9, it comes the Berlin Wall was torn down. Meanwhile, the three Baltic republics withdraw from the USSR.
Gorbachev tries to glue the pieces together by proposing a new Union Treaty who did he stay with?
But the storm is getting closer. On the eve of the agreement, on August 19, 1991, the Conservatives thought of giving the push. On paper they are very strong: there is the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Interior, the head of the KGB. Gorbachev is held prisoner in Crimea where is he on vacation. Then brought back to Moscow. It feels like the end.
However, the world has changed, Gorbachev changed it.
The man who changed the fate of the Soviet Union
Boris Yeltsin gets on one of the tanks sent by the coup plotters to take Parliament, the White House. And the army doesn't react. The coup failed.
But power has changed hands: it now belongs to the head of Russia, and when Gorbachev tries to relaunch the Treaty, Yeltsin takes the initiative.
Together with the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine he decides it dissolution of the USSR: it is December 8, 1991, at Christmas the Soviet flag is lowered by the Kremlin.
And Gorby enters oblivion.
The era of Gorbachev ends
During the years of Putin, Gorbachev managed to find a role with his Foundation, above all as a representative.
After the authoritarian turn, however, he distanced himself. For example, buying, together with the oligarch Alexander Lebedev, the opposition newspaper, New Gazeta, now closed like all the others.
For sure today the world mourns Gorbachev more so than his compatriots.
But it is not impossible for the Russians to change their mind about the future: it is true that the years of Humiliation are over and that they are once again feared, but at what cost?
