When I showed up for grad school in Chapel Hill in August of 1989, I had intended to focus on Middle East politics. But three months into my first semester at UNC, of course, a series of stunning popular revolutions swept through Communist Eastern Europe, highlighted by the astonishing fall of the Berlin Wall that November 9. I was captivated by the energy and idealism of those world-shaking events, changed my focus, and began studying Russian. By the time I was ready to start my dissertation research in earnest, in the mid-1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the newly independent Russia had descended into economic chaos. Similar developments were unfolding elsewhere in formerly Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. What had been a story of profound political optimism and transformation had become a slow motion disaster.
I lived in Russia for about ten months, from the fall of 1995 to the summer of 1996. By the time I arrived in 1995, Boris Yeltsin had been president for four years and was facing an uphill reelection battle the following year. He hadn’t appeared in public in months, due to another bout of alcohol-induced incapacitation. He was enfeebled and a national embarrassment, the non-functioning leader of a country in the throes of an economic cataclysm. Russia was in a parlous state, embroiled in a grinding war in Chechnya, its people suffering under the weight of the devastating “shock therapy” economic reforms. At that time, though Gorbachev had no formal power, he was still a prominent public figure, both in Russia and overseas. He was vigorous and sharp and continued to weigh in on the major issues of the day, a stark contrast to the frequently inebriated, often slurring Yeltsin. Gorbachev even tried to run for President of Russia in 1996 (he won less than 1% of the vote).1
When I asked Russians about Gorbachev back then, they mostly expressed derision, viewing him as responsible for Russia’s degradation. They typically pointed out that a once global power had become a weakened basket case. Gorbachev, they rightly observed, had set in motion forces that would lead to the dismantling of the centrally planned Soviet economy, without a serious plan for what would replace it, only half-formed ideas that resulted in chaos and threw many millions of people into desperate poverty.
I usually responded by saying, in spite of all that, how much I admired Gorbachev. I knew, of course, that Russians were suffering terribly. ( I lived with a woman to whom I paid room and board, a scientist with two advanced degrees in geology who went months at a time without receiving a paycheck). But I thought it took extraordinary courage for him to challenge decades of stultifying Soviet rule. Before Gorbachev, it was simply unimaginable that a Soviet leader would pursue anything like glasnost, to allow Soviet citizens the freedom to publicly criticize their leaders, including him, to shine a light on the crimes of the Soviet regime, including Stalin, to unshackle the chains that prevented people from striving for popular self-government. He was also a man of unique integrity, in a system awash in abject corruption. He showed, overall, extraordinary restraint during the final year and a half or so of his rule, when the dissolution of the Soviet state became a real possibility. In sum, in the context of the time and system out of which Gorbachev emerged, as global leaders go, he was a unicorn.
I know I sound naive and simple-minded when I describe him in this way. And that’s how most Russians treated me. When they’d tell me how much they hated Gorbachev, and I offered some dopey version of the above, I typically received the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head, as if to say, “of course you think that. You’re an American. And a moron.”
A quarter of a century later, I confess, I still view him with reverence. I’m well versed in his shortcomings.2 But he was a giant of the 20th century, a world historic figure who, under the circumstances, led the Soviet Union through a period of extraordinary tumult with remarkable grace and decency. Indeed, in some ways, I only feel more nostalgia for Gorbachev now. The parade of clownishness and venality that has characterized so many leaders on the world stage in recent years stands in depressing relief to the towering, if flawed figure, that Gorbachev was.
For anyone who’s interested, a couple of pieces of my writing on Russia over the years:.
Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform (definitely not expecting anyone to buy it!)
On why Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War
Yeltsin managed to come back from the political dead to win popular reelection as president that summer, under *highly* dubious circumstances. He later abruptly resigned his office, on December 31, 1999, and turned over the country to Vladimir Putin.
Gorbachev has numerous biographers. One standout is William Taubman, whose Gorbachev: His Life and Times, is especially captivating.
What's your take on the Anne Applebaum take?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/gorbachev-legacy-russia/671288/