Gorbachev, the Un-Putin

For Mikhail Gorbachev, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a teaching moment. Gorbachev used the nuclear fire to force the Soviet bureaucracy to accept his “glasnost” or “openness” policy — freedoms of press, research on the Gulag, campaigns against corruption, and multi-party elections.In contrast, Vladimir Putin has used the threat of a meltdown at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant as a blackmail moment. With his military offensive stalled and reports of helicopter gun battles around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex, Russia’s leader tells the West: “Give me what I want — or an accident could irradiate Europe.”Twisting European arms further, Mr. Putin has halted all gas flows to Germany through its main Baltic pipeline, Nord Stream 1.In contrast, Gorbachev sought to build a reputation as a reliable gas supplier to Europe’s largest economy, building business-like ties with the West.Gorbachev also presided over an arms agreement with America that, for the first time, eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons — and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.In contrast, Mr. Putin has ratcheted up tensions with the West to levels not seen since the pre-Gorbachev Cold War years. Since attacking Ukraine on February 24, Mr. Putin has repeatedly warned of the potential for nuclear escalation.Gorbachev, who died Tuesday in Moscow at the age of 91, will be remembered for his reluctance to use military force. Aside from a few skirmishes, he let the Soviet empire collapse with only a few shots fired. His legacy is that he freed 100 million Central Europeans from Communist rule.In contrast, Mr. Putin has installed an absolute dictatorship at home and started a genocidal war of choice with his western neighbor, Ukraine.As a child, Gorbachev listened to Ukrainian lullabies sung by his Ukrainian mother. According to his longtime interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, the attack on Ukraine “really crushed [Gorbachev] emotionally and psychologically.” Noting that the father of Gorbachev’s late wife Raisa was also Ukrainian, Palazhchenko said: Gorbachev “believed not just in the closeness of the Russian and Ukrainian people, he believed that those two nations were intermingled.”Do Russians want their ruler to be a hard man?When I lived in Moscow, from 2006 to 2014, many Russians reviled Gorbachev as the man who gave away their empire for nothing. When Gorbachev came to power, Russian rule was at a historic high-water mark, stretching from Berlin to the Bering Strait. Today’s Russia is a rump state with a population of 144 million, half the 289 million of the Soviet Union in 1991.This week, Deutsche Welle headlined that Gorbachev was “Germany’s most beloved Russian.” Similarly, on the two times I met Gorbachev in Moscow, I tagged along with a visiting group of American Gorby fans. A nice contribution to The Gorbachev Foundation opened doors for meetings.But Americans and Germans never had to deal with the Soviet Union’s economic collapse. A long established order crashed down like a rickety tenement building, leaving millions in penury. Denied a state funeral today, Gorbachev might have had a different image inside Russia if he had accomplished the nearly impossible: transitioning from 70 years of communism to an equitable free market economy.In 1991, Boris Yeltsin said of Gorbachev, his predecessor: “He thought to unite the impossible: Communism with the market, public property with private property, political pluralism with the Communist Party. These are incompatible couples, but he insisted on them, and therein lay his fundamental strategic mistake.”After the shambolic 1990s, Mr. Putin took office and rode high oil and gas prices to stability and relative economic affluence for many Russians.Now, reversing another Gorbachev legacy, Mr. Putin has imposed total press censorship to airbrush his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry estimates that 47,550 Russian soldiers have been killed in six months of combat. Official US estimates range up to 100,000 Russians killed or wounded. By contrast, 14,453 Soviet soldiers were killed during the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And remember, the USSR had twice the population of Russia today.It was Gorbachev who threw in the towel on Afghanistan, pulling out the last Soviet troops in February 1989. In “Gorbachev: His Life and Times,” William Taubman, an emeritus political scientist at Amherst College, writes, it was “the first time the Soviet Union had pulled back from territories it had ‘liberated’ for Communism.”

Gorbachev, the Un-Putin

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