When I wrote this column about Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s private secretary, Sergei Filatov, was buried in Moscow. To put it mildly: the obituaries for this man, who is known as a ruling intellectual, did not sound very good. He scolded the deceased, what can we hide. Many of those who died remembered the humiliation, hunger, banditry and political lawlessness of the ’90s.
Rare supporters objected: “Yes, there were different things, but there were good ones too! Free trade, free media, cooperation, private property, meetings allowed.” Even the rarest examples of the romantics were encountered: “Yes, it was the best time!”. And then they were sorted by list: freedom, rallies, cooperation, competition …
I read such reviews and thought: no, guys, something is wrong here. And I had already heard that in 2007, when Yeltsin died. Then the same thing happened in a hurry: yes, it was difficult, but there was also cooperation, competition, freedom, new opportunities, all life ahead, potatoes finally brought to the market unfrozen, etc. And since Yeltsin’s death found me in London, only these voices have been heard there.
For days, huge crackling films were shown by the Russians, whom we will not name, about the great democrat Boris Nikolaevich, known as loose political bandits, who gave our people notorious competition, cooperation, freedom and everything else. to arrange. Then I sat down and marveled at the arrogance of these people. Either arrogance or stupidity – nothing else can cause them to attribute the virtues of others to Yeltsin.
After all, it was all at Gorbachev’s disposal! Promotion. Really effective, powerful press. First competitive elections and first democratically elected parliament. Cooperatives uniting shop workers and junior employees of research institutes, sewing jeans to order and soldering radios for the free market.
It was Gorbachev who allowed the cooperatives to supply the same clean potatoes to the stores. Private property declared! The property law was adopted in the USSR in March 1990.
As a kid from the 90s, most of those times still surprise me. Including when people instantly forget who gave them property rights, right of publicity, opportunity to do business and much more. Something began to form in the minds of adults who rushed to fill water in front of the TV, moved money to MMM with Khoper-Invest, and, a year later, firmly believed in Yeltsin’s political technologists who claimed that the best thing they had ever gotten had been created by him. Yeltsin?
Here it is! Law on special cooperation in the USSR – May 26, 1988. Law on private property – March 6, 1990. Beginning of wide publicity – 1987. At the same time, banned literatures began to be returned to libraries. In 1989, the USSR enjoyed complete freedom of expression. It was even fuller than Yeltsin’s because the press was not under the pressure of the oligarchy, gangsters and young business.
To what extent did he have to be zatyukannym, his mouth shut for all people to be so confused? Things got so ridiculous: in the 1996 elections, my girlfriend’s family, the shuttle traders, voted for Yeltsin because he gave them a free market. Gorbachev’s name was also on the ballot, they believed he would take this market. For by the mid-1990s the liberal intelligentsia was everywhere, in all seriousness, praising Yeltsin for Gorbachev’s virtues.
Mikhail Gorbachev is a politician of rare fate, whose virtues are attributed to his rival, and he himself lived a long life, having the opportunity to see with his own eyes the fruits of clouding the minds of citizens.
But it’s not so bad that Gorbachev for 30 years listened to how Yeltsin was praised for his virtues – after all, they scolded Mikhail Sergeyevich for someone else’s. First of all for the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet man seemed to bang his forehead against the wall and immediately forgot that the Belovezhskaya Accords were Yeltsin.
Yes, Gorbachev, a member of the State Council, managed to sign the decision of this body to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. But firstly, the day after Gorbachev’s resignation, only these three countries recognized the independence of the other republics of the USSR. Secondly, a year ago the Supreme Soviet of the USSR under Gorbachev declared that the withdrawal of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from the Union was illegitimate. Third, seeing the inevitability of the emergence of these republics, Gorbachev tried in every possible way to create a new union state organized on the federal principle. He finally held a referendum on the preservation of the USSR.
It is clear that the former Secretary General is trying to hold the country together. Unlike Yeltsin, who later circulated the RSFSR and promised the inner republics of Russia as much sovereignty as they wanted if they did not “explode”. Meanwhile, Yeltsin, on behalf of the RSFSR, recognized the independence of the republics before Gorbachev. Gorbachev, for example, did not recognize an independent Ukraine, while Yeltsin did so in the summer of 1991. And he got to know Latvia faster than he was asked. It seriously happened that Riga did not even have time to send a relevant delegation to Moscow, Yeltsin handed the decree recognizing the sovereignty of Latvia to a completely random person.
It can be understood whether Gorbachev or Yeltsin was trying to save the country. But for some reason they remembered everything in a distorted way. It is clear that Gorbachev is a weak politician. He didn’t hold back. I didn’t wait. At the same time, it was Yeltsin, not Yeltsin, who was able to prevent bloodshed during the sovereign parade. Today Yeltsin is commemorated with the bloodless collapse of the USSR and the peaceful transition of the economy onto capitalist tracks. However, Yeltsin came to power as the republics de facto moved away from the RSFSR. Paradox: Under Gorbachev there was no war, but under Yeltsin there were wars in Chechnya, Tajikistan, Transnistria and Karabakh. The opposite turned out: Gorbachev managed to save the entire region from bloodshed, but Yeltsin failed. But he went down in history as a leader who brought about the bloodless collapse of this country.
I tell you, the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev is difficult. All the good deeds he did were attributed to his opponent, and almost all of Yeltsin’s dogs were attributed to Gorbachev, except that they forgot to attribute the creation of the oligarchy and the seven bankers.
Of course everything was there. It could not bring the economy and industry out of recession. Under him, they both rose, under him the goods in the stores disappeared. Gorbachev’s biggest crime is hiding the extent of the Chernobyl accident. Suffice it to say that on May 1, 1986, schoolchildren from the cities and towns closest to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went to the demonstrations just because Gorbachev decided not to cause panic. So the world doesn’t know until the end whether he was bad at the time, scared or didn’t understand the extent of the tragedy.
With Afghanistan for many years. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for the unification of Germany, but withdrew troops from there and from Europe in general under embarrassing circumstances, essentially abandoning the equipment there, leaving the buildings and training grounds. For example, I was at a Soviet military base near the town of Szczecinek, where there are barracks and a large training ground. Everything, including the uniform, was left to the Poles. This is both wasteful and painful.
Many mistakes. But for me, it all falls into the background when I remember, after all these years, that his successor made many more of these mistakes, and it was said that they were all attributed to Gorbachev. Meanwhile, with a good education, it turned out that he was the second leader of the country after Lenin.
And if we remember that Lenin received his higher education as an outside student and was self-taught, we must admit that Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader with a solid diploma. His wife graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, knew English, knew how to behave at international meetings. “Raiska” has been ridiculed by the public for her claims that she loves luxury and likes to climb everywhere, but neither one nor the other has been confirmed. Raisa Maksimovna’s clothes were modest, and the fact that she climbed somewhere is expressed, for example, when her wife read the foreign press and informed Gorbachev after the Chernobyl accident.
He was humble and did charity work. However, this fact was distorted by the public. It was rumored that he started saving children from cancer because he fell ill, but that’s not the case. They also said that Gorbachev was “punished by God” because of Chernobyl, along with the Chernobyl disease. I don’t understand why they don’t like Gorbachev. It just bothered me that she didn’t walk around in a dressing gown like Nina Khrushcheva and didn’t hide at home like Victoria Brezhneva.
The Gorbachevs did not find any wealth after their resignation. They lived modestly by modern standards, Gorbachev earned money by shooting in commercials and writing memoirs, by the way, very thoughtful and frank: in his books he appears as an honest man. He even talked so much about his role in aggravating the consequences of the Chernobyl accident that he wanted to believe that he did not want to deceive anyone.
He lived long. It is rare that one can only sympathize with this, for he has seen how his memory has been distorted and distorted.
A few years ago I published a novel about children in the early 90s. When the magazine version was published, I immediately asked two of my acquaintances who had contacted Gorbachev to give it to him because I feared that he would not live to see a full-fledged book come out. I signed the magazine as follows: “To Mikhail Sergeevich – about what happened right after.”
Because almost all of the horrors retrospectively attributed to Gorbachev today actually happened right after his departure. And all the little goodies we had in the 90s were given to us by Gorbachev. And I don’t understand why people forget that.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.