Mikhail Gorbachev deserves no credit for losing the Cold War
National Post, 04 September 2022
Though we should, at least, be grateful he refrained from shooting the prisoners as they fled the gulag
Mikhail Gorbachev lost the Cold War without firing a single shot.
He was not the measure of his partner in history, Ronald Reagan, whom Margaret Thatcher eulogized as having won the Cold War without firing a single shot.
But it was a far side better than having lost the Cold War with a return to the “bloodlands” — Timothy Snyder’s term for the land between Moscow and Berlin, the most lethal part of the world between 1932-1945, in which upwards of thirty million people were murdered, starved, worked or marched to death, exterminated or died in battle.
The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and by year’s end all the communist dominoes had fallen in Europe. Gorbachev went to Malta in December to declare the Cold War over with President George Bush, Sr. The latter was kind enough not to require Gorbachev to travel to Fulton, Missouri, to announce the tearing asunder of Churchill’s Iron Curtain.
En route to Malta he stopped at the Vatican in an act of surrender as dramatic as that of imperial Japan aboard the USS Missouri or, for those with a longer view of history, Henry VI, the holy Roman emperor, taking the long walk to Canossa in 1077 to meet Pope Gregory VII. The leader of what had been a brutal atheistic regime was able to discuss with Pope John Paul II how history had answered Stalin’s question: “How many divisions does the pope have?”
Gorbachev was a gracious and good loser.
That was a very consequential thing. It was essential for global liberty, peace and prosperity that the evil empire be defeated — not contained, not co-existed with, not accommodated. The defeat was coming soon; Reagan told the Westminster mother of all parliaments just that in June 1982. It was vital that the Soviet Union not lose in the manner in which it had previously won, with a hammer to the head and a sickle at the throat. More than essential and vital, it was “providential”, as John Paul would call Gorbachev.
It was already over by 1985, when the cadaverous Soviet politburo chose Gorbachev to succeed a series of leaders only slightly less corpselike than Lenin himself was in Red Square. The Soviet economy was unable to provide basic food and consumer goods, the exchequer was addicted to alcohol revenues and the Red Army could not keep pace with the Reagan defence buildup. While the Soviet Union had added several countries to its collection of Castroesque satellites under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Reagan stopped their expansion cold. With the American invasion of tiny Grenada, it was even reversed.
Lady Thatcher got it right at Reagan’s funeral when she spoke of Gorbachev as a “man of goodwill” who ‘would emerge from the dark corridors.” At the moment of its defeat and dismemberment the Soviets needed a leader of goodwill, a good loser.
Two years and two summits after Gorbachev’s coming to power, Reagan went to Berlin in 1987, giving rise to the quotation that will keep Gorbachev’s name alive longer than any of his own speeches: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Gorbachev did not tear it down. When the Germans tore down the wall themselves, free citizens and communist slaves meeting together, Gorbachev declined to order their massacre. He did not fire a single shot, and for that a grateful world remembers him.
Two factors fed the fevered western laudations which greeted Gorbachev during his tenure as General Secretary of the Communist Party: gratitude for an end to Soviet mass bloodletting and elite disdain for Reagan.
The diplomatic chancelleries — including in Washington — were aghast at Reagan’s speech at the Berlin Wall, as they had been aghast at his evil empire speech, and his opposition to central American communist proxies, and his deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe. The panjandrums of the press were similarly distressed. How could Reagan — to say nothing of John Paul II or Thatcher — be considered the colossus of communism’s collapse?
The solution was to credit the jailer for the jailbreak, for not shooting the prisoners as they fled the gulag. Time magazine, then still a significant title, led the way by declaring Gorbachev the “man of the decade” not just “man of the year.” The adulation was fulsome.
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