The day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24, the legacy of Mikhail S. Gorbachev looming over President Vladimir V. Putin’s pre-conclusion speech.
“The paralysis of power and will is the first step to complete decline and oblivion,” Putin stressed when the Soviet Union collapsed. “We only lost confidence for a moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world.”
For Mr. Putin, the end of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the century”, a “real tragedy” for millions of Russians because it caused them to live scattered across national borders. newly formed. According to Mr. Putin, the disaster was caused by the weak nerves of a leader who was too willing to submit to the demands of a treacherous and treacherous West – a mistake, the propaganda in the media said. Pictures of the Kremlin now often remind viewers that Mr. Putin is determined. not repeat.
In Ukraine, Putin is fighting in the shadows of the empire that Gorbachev eventually chaired, which has begun a war that has left thousands dead to restore Moscow’s domination of the land it belongs to. claimed as Russian land. But Mr. Putin’s fight to reverse Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy extends beyond the territorial control over the personal and political liberties left by the last president of the Soviet Union – and the Kremlin now stands. is rapidly unraveling.
“All of Gorbachev’s reforms are now nil, turned to ashes,” a friend of Gorbachev’s, radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview. “This is the work of his life.”
Mr. Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was still in power when Venediktov’s liberal radio station, Echo of Moscow, first broadcast in 1990 and became a symbol of the new freedoms taking shape. city of Russia. After Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February, the Kremlin forced the station to close.
And Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper that Mr. Gorbachev used his Nobel Peace Prize winnings to help establish in the early 1990s, was forced to suspend publication in March, threatened by new wartime censorship laws.
Mr. Gorbachev, in poor health, has said nothing publicly this year about the war in Ukraine. His Gorbachev Foundation, an institute that “sees to promote democratic values,” released a statement two days after the invasion calling for a “quick end to hostilities” and “beginning of hostilities.” immediate peace negotiations”.
But Mr. Gorbachev, the son of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, supports Putin’s view of Ukraine as a “brother state” that should be in Russia’s orbit. He Support Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, described the move as representing the will of a densely populated area identified as Russian. And he Conquer the West for “trying to draw Ukraine into NATO”, warning that such efforts “will bring nothing but discord between Ukraine and Russia.”
But he also appeared confident that the worst could be avoided. When asked about the tensions between Ukraine and Russia in 2014, he told a Siberian news agency, “A war between Russia and Ukraine – this is absurd.”
“This is a man who opposes violence and bloodshed,” said Dmitri A. Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta and last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winnersaid in a phone interview.
However, Mr. Gorbachev’s exact view of the invasion that began six months before his death remains a mystery. Mr. Muratov said that he has visited Mr. Gorbachev regularly in the hospital for the past two years and that he believes Mr. Gorbachev “is not qualified to comment on current political events”.
Mr. Putin issued a statement Wednesday that sounded like a conciliatory note – even as his allies in Congress and in state media went so far as to label Mr. location in hell.
Mr. Putin, addressing Mr. Gorbachev’s “relatives and friends”, said, “Mikhail Gorbachev is a politician and statesman who had a great influence on the course of world history.”
Putin added: “He deeply understood that reform was necessary, he tried to come up with his own solutions to pressing problems.
The brief statement allowed Mr. Putin to emerge as a statesman above the political conflict, but it quickly became clear that Mr. Gorbachev would not be revered by the Kremlin. Its spokesman said that the form of Mr. Gorbachev’s funeral – whether it received state titles, for example – has yet to be determined.
The cornerstone of Mr. Putin’s propaganda message is that he stabilizes Russia – rebuilding the country’s economy and status as a great power – after the tumultuous and humiliating 1990s ushered in by Mr. Gorbachev.
As a result, after his death Mr. Gorbachev immediately became a symbol for Kremlin allies that trying to liberalize society and do good with the West could lead to disaster. Putin dismissed his view of Gorbachev as a weak negotiator last year when he told NBC that the West had tricked the last Soviet leader at the end of the Cold War by suggesting NATO would does not expand eastward but does not make such a commitment. in a treaty. (American officials say they don’t make such commitment.)
Mr. Putin speak During the interview, use a schoolyard rhyme.
That historic grievance underpins Mr. Putin’s opinion that the West is unreliable and that Russia needs a stronger, more assertive leader, a view state media asserted on Thursday. With harsh criticism of Mr. Gorbachev.
State news agency RIA Novosti said: “Mikhail Gorbachev can be an illustration that the good intentions of a national leader can create hell on earth for the whole country. It described him responsible for “a devastated country, a nightmare of the 1990s, and millions of lives lost in civil wars, ethnic cleansing, terrorist attacks and gang wars.”
Igor Korotchenko, a military analyst who frequently appears on state TV talk shows, is even more blunt. On Twitter, he write about Mr. Gorbachev: “Burn in Hell!”
For Russians yearning for better relations with the West and more freedoms at home, Mr. Gorbachev remains a visionary. But Mr. Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta, thinks that perhaps the former Soviet leader’s greatest legacy is that his arms control negotiations with President Ronald Reagan reduced the chances of nuclear annihilation. core. On the contrary, Mr. Putin did not shy away from threatening the West with his nuclear arsenal and Scary new rocket.
“They gave us the gift of at least 30 years of life not threatened by a global nuclear war,” Mr. Muratov said of Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Reagan. “We wasted this gift. The gift does not exist anymore”.
