Gorbachev dies: Western tributes, Russian condemnation

Gorbachev: The leader who stopped lying and dismantled the USSR

The announcement of Mikhail Gorbachev's death, the last leader of the Soviet Union, reopens a balance that the West never closed and which in Russia seems condemned: according to messages collected in the thread, he is considered there as a traitor, the worst leader in its history alongside Boris Yeltsin. Abroad, tributes. The distance between the two narratives says less about the deceased than about those who judge him.

The data that best measures the blow is not political, but demographic. According to a circulating calculation, Russia began losing population in 1994 and has not recovered the 148.412.000 inhabitants of that year; according to that same comparison, it would have returned to 1987 levels. Ukraine continues to shrink with no signs of slowing down. With these figures, some argue that the fall of the USSR hurt more than World War II. That is where the dispute begins.

Was Gorbachev a traitor to Russia?

In much of Russian public conversation, yes. The most repeated reasoning is not historical, but symmetrical: if precisely the countries that benefited from the disintegration applaud him, there must be some treason. The greatest evidence, this argument says, is who rolls out the red carpet for him.

The objection comes from another angle: he was not a traitor, he was a realist. The USSR needed deep reform and he tried to implement it without blowing up the building; the problem is that the building was already hollow. What even his defenders do not forgive him is the inconsistency at the end: in 1991, with the republics declaring sovereignty and the system going down the drain, he sent the army to suppress the Lithuanian independence activists whom he himself had encouraged in previous years.

The ruble, grain, and a fictional economy

Here the discussion becomes concrete and numbers rule. The ruble was already worth little before Gorbachev, one reading argues: the Politburo simply decreed that 1 ruble equaled 1.6 dollars and when they stopped lying, the exchange rate went to its real place. The same thesis recalls that the USSR imported grain from the West in massive quantities during its last two or three decades, and that FAO data from that era relied on official Soviet sources, which did not disguise reality: they invented it.

From this emerges the terrible drop in food production that appeared just after 1991. The harvest did not fall: the statistics measuring it did. And a nuance often forgotten: before Gorbachev, the population could not complain; with him, they started doing so. Scarcity was not new. The freedom to say it existed, was.

CPSU elites and the restoration of capitalism

Another current shifts the focus from the man to the class. The Soviet nomenclature lived well, but owned nothing and could leave nothing to their children beyond a position. When they understood that their Western counterparts were true owners, the interest in bringing down the system moved inside the party itself. Subsequent privatization turned those cadres into the new capitalists. Hence talk of a controlled demolition and a distribution of public enterprises among the CPSU bureaucracy, although the source affirming this doubts whether that distribution corresponded to Gorbachev or Yeltsin.

The error attributed to Europe

There is a less conspiratorial reading. Gorbachev would have sought peace with Washington in exchange for not withdrawing tanks, and the gesture was not reciprocated. The great error was not his, it is argued, but that of a Europe that turned its back on Russia when it should have helped it. That moment was key. It was not seized. It is also maintained that the disintegration paved the way for NATO expansion to the East, and that is the origin of much of what trinc.

Why write Gorbachev and not Gorbachov

The linguistic curiosity of the matter has its charm. In Russian, the E sounds like ie and the Ë, with diaeresis, sounds like io; since the diaeresis is omitted in writing, the West transliterated the wrong letter. The same happens with Kruchov or Jruchov: the Russian X sounds like our jota, English converts it to kh, and here it is read as a k. Half a century misspelling surnames by translating through English.

The analysis gets stuck exactly where it started. There is no agreement on whether Gorbachev dismantled a country or simply stopped pretending it remained standing. Both fit in the same man. Both are uncomfortable.