There were elements in the West that wanted Mikhail Gorbachev to succeed, but there were others that wanted to exploit him to weaken Russia as a geopolitical rival. The latter prevailed, to Russia’s great harm.

On Saturday 3 September, Mikhail Gorbachev was laid to rest in his family burial place, next to his wife Raisa. Gorbachev, the first and the only president of the Soviet Union, was buried in the Novodevichye Cemetery, where Soviet and Russian Federation VIPs are traditionally buried, with honour guard members participating in a private family funeral. Prior to that was a dignified public remembrance ceremony in the Hall of Columns, an important building close to the Kremlin and Red Square. Security was tight. Visitors included family members, senior politician and former Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, and in a private but televised individual visit before the ceremony President Vladimir Putin. Putin was filmed observing two minutes respectful and reflective silence as he left a large bunch of red roses at the bier. Many Muscovites paid their respects and left roses. US Ambassador John Sullivan went, his last official act before ending his Russia posting.

It was in every way a dignified and respectful occasion, as befits a former Russian president. Mikhail Gorbachev, a controversial figure in Russia, did his best for his country in difficult times. I am angered by the Western exploitation of Gorbachev, a major Russian historical figure, in his death as in his life. He was suckered by the West, and he finally realised this only towards the end of his life as he watched the tragedy in Ukraine. This was his personal tragedy.

I attended the funeral of Gorbachev’s predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko, in 1985 as a member of Senator John Button’s official party representing Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Washington had been keen for a strong showing of US allies’ leaders in Moscow, and Hawke readily responded.

I still vividly remember Gorbachev’s speech in Red Square, and his youthful, confident tone of voice. He seemed to have the world at his feet then. There is an almost Shakespearean tragic quality about Gorbachev’s years as Soviet supreme leader, from 1985 to 1990. In a sentence, his former virtues became his vices.

To rise to the top of the Soviet political system, from relatively humble beginnings in small-town southern Russia as Mikhail Gorbachev did, required three elements: great personal strengths of intelligence, ambition, and willpower; supreme self-belief in one’s own leadership capability and ability to convince others of this; and the essential third element, good luck. For most of his Soviet political career, Gorbachev rode the wave of success, drawing on all three attributes.

It was no accident that, when his uninspiring predecessor Chernenko died in 1985 at age 73 after less than a year in office, Gorbachev was the unanimous choice of his Politburo colleagues to succeed Chernenko. Gorbachev had already risen to prominence under Chernenko’s capable predecessor, Yuri Andropov, in power from 1982 to 1984.  Andropov had highly estimated Gorbachev as a cautious reformer, while remaining a devout Communist believer like Andropov himself, but with youth and energy on his side.

Gorbachev was only 54 when he became Soviet leader. He should have enjoyed years of successful leadership. The Soviet system was still working well enough to sustain a credible nuclear second-strike deterrent against the United States. Its space program was equal to or ahead of the US program. It enjoyed much respect and affection in the nonaligned world through its reliable military and moral support for anti-colonial struggles. Things could have gone on like this for a long time. It is only the dubious wisdom of Western hindsight that says Gorbachev was doomed to fail, and to bring down the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s nemesis was Boris Yeltsin, who typified the growing regional jealousies and burning personal ambitions becoming rife in the Soviet Communist Party in every Soviet Republic, including in the central Russian Federation that held the whole structure together. Yeltsin’s family background in Yekaterinburg, suffering unfairly under Stalinism, left him with a well concealed but burning contempt for the Soviet Communist system. Yeltsin did not believe, as Gorbachev did, in the New Soviet Man. He thought Russia was being exploited by the greedy, smaller surrounding republics. Yeltsin believed only in Russia, and he plotted tirelessly to bring down Gorbachev and the Soviet system.

Gorbachev’s supreme self-confidence and his belief in the strength of the Soviet system, qualities which had brought him to the top in 1985, proved inadequate to the challenges facing him five years later, when the third essential element, luck, ran out.

His former virtues became his vices. He was overconfident and swayed by the false Western adulation of him. He consistently underestimated the threat that Yeltsin’s narrow Russian nationalism represented, both to him personally as Soviet leader and to the whole Soviet system.

The second thing Gorbachev fatally underestimated was Western malevolence. He really came to believe that Ronald Reagan’s United States was his friend. When Reagan said “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” his real request was “tear down your Soviet system.”

Gorbachev for years did not really understand how Henry Kissinger in the Nixon years, 1973 to 1977, and Zbigniev Brzezinski in the Carter years, 1977 to 1981, had been architects of a consistent bipartisan Washington elite policy of exploiting detente to weaken the Soviet Union by persuading the naive and easily corrupted Russian elite that their country was actually second-rate, and would always be an outlier of the glamorous West that seemed to do almost everything  better than the Soviet Union. For years, this ate away from within the Soviet system, which seemed on the surface to be so strong and self-confident right up until its final self-destruction. Gorbachev only began to understand, toward the end of his thirty-two years of retirement in Russia after 1990, how Western information warfare had successfully sapped Russian strength and self-confidence.

Many older Russians will not easily forgive Gorbachev for his fatal mistakes in his years in power. They bitterly remember the horrible decade of crime, starvation, and national humiliation that followed, truly a second Time of Troubles for Russia from 1990 to 1999.

Future Russian historians may be kinder to him. He humanised the Soviet system as symbolised in his well-known rehabilitation of dissident nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. He gave a younger generation of Russians hope for a more democratic future. Those seeds have flourished in the new Russia.

He also presented to Russians a model of East-West detente that, for all its risks and dangers that we now better understand, held out hopes of a better more harmonious future for both East and West. It is not his fault that the Western power elite exploited his generosity of spirit.

Gorbachev and the much younger Putin might have found, in Gorbachev’s final years, that they had something important in common: their shared love and loyalty for the Russian world. Where Putin most sharply diverges from Gorbachev, and more resembles Yeltsin, is in Putin’s hatred and loathing of Soviet communism and how easily it had become corrupted and self-destructive under the Western ideological onslaught on the Russian world. Putin sees his life task now to rebuild and defend that Russian world.

Tony Kevin was a DFAT career officer from 1968 to 1998. His first posting was in Moscow in 1969, and his last postings were as ambassador to Poland and finally to Cambodia. Tony is author of the memoir Return to Moscow (UWA Publishing , 2016). 

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