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In hindsight, President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ruler of the Soviet Union, were the two most unexpected people of the 1980s. Gorbachev’s passing Tuesday at age 91 represents the last link to that momentous closing chapter of the Cold War, whose peaceful end was nothing short of miraculous.
Expect in the coming hours and days for the media and “leading” academics to lionize Gorbachev for single-handedly ending the Cold War. Ronald who? Never heard of him. (Reuters: “Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War, dies aged 91” [emphasis mine]. That didn’t take long.)
To be sure, Gorbachev did have genuine liberalizing sentiments, but he couldn’t really shake the shackles of the illiberal ideology of Communism, let alone its bureaucratic inertia. Hence his “perestroika” (or “restructuring”) was incoherent, as he made clear in a comment to the Politburo right after his ascension in 1985: “What we need is more dynamism, more social justice, more democracy — in a word, more socialism.”
No, what you need, George Shultz told him in a highly impertinent meeting in the Kremlin in 1988, is property rights, open markets and protection of civil liberties — especially free speech. After a very long pause, Gorbachev joked that maybe he needed Shultz to be his economic minister.
At least it can be said that his main contribution to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union was his decision that the USSR would no longer shoot people in large numbers to stay in power, especially in the Captive Nations of Eastern Europe.
