Yes, there is something cynical about some of the funeral eulogies to Mikhail Gorbachev after his death last week, especially to the other side of the Atlantic, or the funeral paid to him by the German Parliament on Tuesday.
No one can deny that the last president of the Soviet Union made possible the unification of Germany, the liberation of the European countries hitherto subject to Moscow, and with it the end of the Cold War.
Gorbachev undoubtedly played a decisive role in reducing the country’s huge military budget and its military presence in various regions of the then called Third World, all of which became a heavy burden on the Soviet economy.
Likewise, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it helped the United States fight terrorism by, for example, allowing its planes to fly over Soviet territory to Afghanistan. And it facilitated the resolution of conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.
No one has contributed more to stimulating negotiations on the delimitation of nuclear arsenals as well as medium-range missiles on European soil.
But how did Washington pay for it? President Ronald Reagan, who seemed to get along very well with Gorbachev, could certainly have done much more to help the Soviet leader undertake the democratization of his vast country.
There are tasks as difficult as creating a civil society based on political participation and openness to the world, or getting the republics that formed the Soviet Union at that time to live together within the framework of a new democratic state.
But the White House was more concerned with weakening the USSR economy and preventing its rapprochement with Western Europe than Gorbachev’s idea of ​​building a “common European home” stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
Not only did Gorbachev fail to prevent the dissolution of the USSR, he was naive in trusting US Secretary of State James Baker’s assurances to both him and Secretary of State Eduard Shevardnadze that NATO would not enlarge. East.
Sadly it faced these promises! The Atlantic Alliance only verbally welcomed countries that were previously included in the Warsaw Pact, and even sought to expand to other countries, such as Georgia or Ukraine, that were a founding part of the Soviet Union and eventually ruled by nationalist forces.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s outlawing the Communist Party as a result of the coup attempt by some members of Gorbachev’s reforms, who were not satisfied with his reforms, dealt a heavy blow to Gorbachev, who was the general secretary.
It is as drastic as the definitive dissolution of the USSR, which Gorbachev tried to avoid until the very last moment, and which current Russian President Vladimir Putin has described as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century.”
With Gorbachev’s withdrawal from the political scene came the years of Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation, the disastrous privatization of companies, the distribution of natural resources among the oligarchs, widespread corruption and inequality, and an increase in poverty.
All this explains the emergence of an ultranationalist autocrat like the one Gorbachev could never have foreseen, but after the disastrous government of the dipsomaniac Yeltsin, a character on the opposite end of the last president. of the Soviet Union.
Certainly, Washington and the West as a whole could have done much more for Mikhail Gorbachev and democracy in his country!
Source: Informacion
Ben Stock is a business analyst and writer for “Social Bites”. He offers insightful articles on the latest business news and developments, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the business world.