“Gorby is hard to understand,” Gorbachev told Taubman’s biographer as the American historian began to decipher the unique world leader. Controversial by the Russians, adored by the Germans and probably just liked by the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His great achievement is the peaceful transition of the USSR to the new order and the avoidance of a catastrophe, such as the Nazi massacre that Gorby had experienced as a child in the Second World War and had been etched in his memory undeservedly. Chernobyl showed how close we were in 1986. The sick Soviet system had developed “toxic weapons” everywhere. Controlling it was a feat. If Gorby was not at the helm of Russia, developments for the world would be much more painful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His path as a leader who would change the fortunes of the world was not predetermined. When, as a gifted student, he began to question Stalin’s methods, the KGB gave him and his life partner Raisa a clear message: their criticism would immediately stop any further ambition. He thus learned to maneuver with the rules of the game and connected personally with the mighty Andropov.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was undoubtedly helped by the global and domestic situation. The stars in the West, in the 1980s, formed an ideal arrangement: Reagan, Kohl, Mitterrand, Pope John Paul II. In the USSR, an unprecedented sequence of losing three very old Soviet leaders within three years, brought him in 1985 to the presidency of the CPSU and the Supreme Soviet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faced with the impasses of the USSR, he immediately began a reform program. However, his financial training was incomplete, just like every Soviet mandarin, but also every economist who tried to deal with the Lernaean Hydra that communism had nurtured for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But how rotten the system was, and the dangers lurking for all of humanity, he realized in the harshest way in the Chernobyl explosion. He later learned that 90 smaller explosions had preceded it. However, no public official had mentioned them, because he had simply not been asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After this tragedy Gorby was unconvinced. Glasnost and perestroika had to be implemented immediately, as a shock treatment to a critically ill patient who was simultaneously suffering from metastatic cancer and cardiac arrest. The future of the rest of the Eastern Bloc leaves him coldly indifferent. Jaruzelski, Honecker, Ceausescu and Zhivkov had become caricatures of a system that he himself was desperately trying to reform in his country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The initial response from the West was warm, united and (partially) generous. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the transition of Eastern Europe to the sphere of democracy is the most important point of the generation of the West. However, in the intoxication of dominance, the winners of the Cold War forgot the two basic principles with which they transformed their former rivals, Germany and Japan. Firstly, with undivided and continuous financial aid, secondly, with institutional armoring of the defeated with the best practices of Western democracies. When prosperous and healthy Democracies do not come to rupture again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Major and Bush lacked the substance of their predecessors. They stood in the shadow of the world-changing catalytic developments, refusing to contribute decisively to the economic and institutional assistance that Russia needed. Mitterrand focused their attention on European unification, while Kohl began to realize that in order to transform East Germany, a multi-trillion economic recovery saga needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Russia also needed many times more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gorby collapsed, politically alone internally and externally. History is not written with ‘ifs'”. But the comparison of the current situation that we all experience, with how Gorby managed crises, is another confirmation of his uniqueness as a world leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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