Gorbachev’s Legacy Varies Through East, West Lens
Fri, 09/02/2022 - 01:37pm | By: Heather Marie Stur, Ph.D.
In the winter of 1987, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, traveled
to Washington, D.C., where Gorbachev was set to meet with U.S. president Ronald Reagan.
It was the third summit between the two leaders as they tried to reach an agreement
on nuclear arms limitations. Gorbachev enjoyed much popularity with U.S. citizens.
Polls showed that he had a higher approval rating among Americans than did most U.S. politicians. While in Washington, Gorbachev gave
his fans a thrill when he left his motorcade to shake hands with American bystanders.
This is the image of Gorbachev that I remember. I was 12 in 1987, and my limited understanding of international relations came mostly from popular culture and the media. Newspaper photographs of Reagan and Gorbachev smiling at each other and shaking hands were comforting. Gorbachev seemed nice. He did not seem like someone who would authorize a nuclear attack on my country. Maybe the Soviet Union wasn’t such a scary place after all.
On some level, those memories have informed my teaching of the Cold War and my reaction to Gorbachev’s death on August 30 at the age of 91. This semester, I’m teaching a graduate seminar called “The Global Cold War,” and for the past couple of weeks, my students and I have been discussing the scholarly debates over who won the Cold War. Some historians credit U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his oratory prowess. Others emphasize Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev for his willingness to gamble on glasnost and perestroika. Still others assert that both men share responsibility for ending the Cold War. Then there are the scholars who contend that it wasn’t one or two “great men” who won the Cold War, but activists like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and their followers. Pope John Paul II sometimes gets a nod.
I tend to fall into the Gorbachev camp. Without a doubt, Reagan played a central role in bringing the Cold War to an end, and mass uprisings showed the world that communist totalitarianism was not the will of the people. But it was Gorbachev’s decision to capitulate to the principles of democracy and freedom that brought down the Iron Curtain and caused the Soviet Union to collapse. Gorbachev hoped political and economic reforms would save his struggling country, but once Russian and Eastern Bloc citizens got a taste of freedom, there was no going back. Without Gorbachev’s choice, it might have been violent revolutions, rather than velvet ones, that ended the Cold War. His risk was the West’s reward. In 1990, Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yet even conclusions drawn from concrete evidence are matters of perspective. I was texting with a Latvian friend after I’d heard about Gorbachev’s death, and he told me that Latvians, and other Baltic citizens, are ambivalent about the last Soviet leader. When Latvians began mobilizing for independence in January of 1991, Gorbachev sent special forces troops to suppress the movement, and several civilians died in the confrontation. Latvians remember the incident as “the barricades,” in reference to reinforcements that citizens had built to protect government buildings in Riga from the Soviet Army. Gorbachev was willing to relinquish the Eastern Bloc countries but not the republics that had comprised the Soviet Union. Westerners hailed Gorbachev as a visionary who gave Russians a path to liberty, but to Latvians, he was just another Soviet dictator.
Comparing my opinion about Gorbachev with my Latvian friend’s led me to the paradox in Gorbachev’s policies, the tension in his worldview between idealism and realism. Gorbachev understood the pragmatic value of letting Eastern Europeans make their own political choices so as to avoid chaotic and potentially violent uprisings. He did not order Soviet troops in East Germany to stop the fall of the Berlin Wall because he worried that doing so could start World War III. But the Baltic states were Soviet republics, albeit by force, and Gorbachev held on to his belief in the Soviet socialist ideal even as political openness and economic restructuring proved it to be untenable. Latvia was much closer to home than Czechoslovakia, and Czechoslovak freedom was not akin to removing a section of bricks from the Soviet structure. In a twist on the domino theory, if one Baltic state fell to independence, the next ones would fall like dominoes, and soon the Soviet Union would be no more.
At a press conference in Moscow in 1988, Reagan told reporters that Gorbachev deserved most of the credit for improving relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Three years later, on Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev gave his final address as Soviet leader. The USSR ceased to exist that day. Speaking on television, he told the audience that he had no regrets about how he had used his position of power because the country had desperately needed change. Russians had felt hopeless as the economy buckled under the weight of the state bureaucracy, the war in Afghanistan, and the arms race. “We had to change everything radically,” Gorbachev said in his speech. That he did, with intended and unintended consequences.
Dr. Heather Marie Stur is the Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society. She is the author of four books including 21 Days to Baghdad: General Buford Blount and the 3rd Infantry Division in the Iraq War, Osprey Publishing (forthcoming 2023).