Transition : Mikhail Gorbachev, 1931-2022

Mwalimu-G

Mwalimu-G

Elder Lister
CNN
August 31, 2022



Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose
The man who tore down that wall
Image
Reagan and Gorbachev meet in Switzerland on November 19, 1985.
----------
Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy is that he outlived the thaw in the Cold War between Moscow and the US, after doing more than anyone to engineer it.

The last leader of the Soviet Union died on Tuesday at the age of 91, with Washington and the Kremlin on opposite sides of President Vladimir Putin's hot war in Ukraine, launched in part to avenge the Soviet collapse precipitated by Gorbachev's rule.

It is hard to encapsulate what Gorbachev meant to Western publics in the 1980s, after one of the most dangerous periods of the standoff between East and West. After generations of severe, hostile, hardline and elderly Kremlin leaders, he was young, modern and fresh -- a visionary and a reformer. He inspired sudden hope that the nuclear showdown that haunted the world in the second half of the 20th century would not end up destroying civilization. US President Ronald Reagan and his British soulmate, Margaret Thatcher, were the most hawkish of Cold warriors. But to their credit, they realized a moment of promise — as the British Prime Minister said of the Soviet leader: “We can do business together.”

Everybody remembers the day when Reagan went to Berlin and against the backdrop of the Brandenburg Gate -- which had been defaced by the ugly and inhumane concrete barrier between East and West -- said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” It was one of the most iconic moments of modern US history. At the time, few people thought it was possible. In fact, some White House aides thought the comments overly provocative and tried to persuade Reagan not to say them. But in the end, in an act of great humanity, Gorbachev effectively did tear down that wall.

After a heady series of nuclear arms control reduction talks and meetings with Western leaders, Gorbachev became a hero in the West. But it was his decision not to intervene with military force when popular rebellions erupted against Communist regimes in Warsaw Pact nations in 1989 that led to the liberation of Eastern Europe, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany. That outburst of freedom bequeathed 30 years of relative peace in Europe.

But while he was lionized in the West, Gorbachev came to be seen as a pariah at home. It is often forgotten now that his goal wasn't necessarily to dismantle the communist Soviet Union. In many ways, his hand was forced by decades of economic decay in the communist system and the draining impact of a nuclear arms race with the West. But in trying to save the system, he set off forces that destroyed it. Far from heralding the "end of history" as was often said at the time, his influence caused consequences that could still be felt on the day he died, with Moscow and the West again at loggerheads in a Cold War-style chill.

At home, Gorbachev had two overarching ideas, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The swift collapse of the Soviet Union, which perestroika caused to splinter, brought extreme economic conditions, disorder and a blow to national pride. All of this added up to the circumstances that eventually made a strongman like Putin attractive to many Russians.

At the moment when Gorbachev refused to send the Red Army into Eastern Europe to save the communist bloc, Putin was stationed with the KGB in East Germany and felt the sting of Moscow’s desertion. He came to see the demise of the Soviet Empire as a disaster of history; and once Putin gained power, he set about restoring wounded Russian national prestige.

Now the world is saddled with a leader in the Kremlin, who unlike Gorbachev is ready to remake the map of Europe by force — even if a restoration of the Warsaw Pact is beyond his reach, with millions in Eastern Europe now effectively living out Gorbachev’s legacy in democratic, free societies.

Gorbachev’s rule was not without blemishes from a Western point of view. He sent tanks into Lithuania to crush independence hopes in the Baltic states in 1991, months before leaving power. And he was banned from Ukraine for five years after saying he supported Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

But to the end of his days, Gorbachev decried Putin’s excesses and traveled the globe warning of the peril of the plunge in relations between the world’s two top nuclear powers. That he will be remembered as a giant in the West and a pariah at home speaks to the gulf in understanding and experience that again poisons East-West relations.

Gorbachev never stopped mourning his beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. Now, he's followed her and his contemporaries from a remarkable moment in history — Reagan, Thatcher, President George H.W. Bush, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François Mitterrand -- to the grave.

Everywhere but Russia, he will be remembered as one of those rare figures in history, who by character and vision really did change the world.
 
Will always remember him as the man with a visible blood clot on his forehead and his progressive leadership to help end the cold War.
 
many he RIP. Didn't he go on a state visit to the US, and after meetings he retreated to his hotel room, got high on vodka and was found by American cops loitering the streets high as a kite all alone minus security?
 
Mtumsafi said:
got high on vodka and was found by American cops loitering the streets high as a kite all alone minus security?
Click to expand...
No, that was Yeltsin.

https://www.history.com/emails/single/history-in-the-headlines
History Stories

When a Russian President Ended Up Drunk and Disrobed Outside the White House


When a Russian President Ended Up Drunk and Disrobed Outside the White House
Was Bill Clinton's 1994 meeting with Boris Yeltsin the most hilariously awful state visit in history?
Jim McKnight/AP Photo

Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had a weird relationship. There was the time the Russian president gave the U.S. president a pair of hockey jerseys that said “Yeltsin 96” and “Clinton 96.” There was also the time Clinton doubled over laughing when Yeltsin called the U.S. press “a disaster” at a press conference.
But perhaps the weirdest incident in their professional relationship was when Yeltsin got drunk and wandered into the street in his underwear, trying to get a pizza.
The incident happened during Yeltsin and Clinton’s first meeting in Washington in September 1994. Although there were glancing media reports about it over the years, it wasn’t widely reported on until 2009, when author Taylor Branch published his book The Clinton Tapes, based on his interviews with the president.
“Secret Service agents discovered Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi,” Branch wrote in his book. “Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House, where he was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza.”
When Branch asked Clinton how the situation ended, the president shrugged and said, “Well, he got his pizza.” But the next night, Clinton recalled, Yeltsin tried to do it again.
https://www.history.com/news/5-myths-about-slavery

“Eluding security, he made his way down the back stairs into the Blair House basement, where a building guard mistook him for a drunken intruder,” Branch wrote. “Yeltsin was briefly endangered until converging Russian and American agents sorted out everyone’s affiliation.” Because the guards mistook him for an intruder, “Clinton thought this incident, although contained within Blair House, exposed even greater risk than the pizza quest.”

Russian President Boris Yeltsin finishing his glass of vodka next to President Bill Clinton in 1995 as Russia celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. (Credit: Gerard Fouet/AFP/Getty Images)


Russian President Boris Yeltsin finishing his glass of vodka next to President Bill Clinton in 1995 as Russia celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. (Credit: Gerard Fouet/AFP/Getty Images)
Unfortunately, these nighttime escapades illustrated a larger problem that Yeltsin had with alcohol. The Washington Post has reported that during the 1995 press conference where Yeltsin called the U.S. press “a disaster,” he was drunk on white wine. In another Post article, the former deputy secretary of state under Clinton suggested that the reason the U.S. president had laughed so hard at Yeltsin’s “disaster” jibe was because he was trying to cover for how drunk the Russian president was. Another time, Yeltsin reportedly called Clinton while inebriated and asked him to hold a secret meeting on a submarine.
During Yeltsin’s presidency from 1991 to 1999, his alcoholism worsened to the point where he was frequently stumbling and falling over. He also exhibited inappropriate behavior on camera, such as when he pinched a couple of female secretaries in front of reporters. These antics have now become a part of his legacy as a world leader.
Upon his death in 2007, the German newspaper Der Spiegel nodded to this fact with a notably blunt obituary title: “The Rise and Fall of the Drunken Czar.”
 
Gorbachev in my opinion orchestrated the most disastrous collapse of a superpower ever.

It is not for nothing that he is receiving profuse praise from beberu leaders - he gave them a free pass to rape the world. Thankfully, Mzito Putin and Emperor Xi are seeing an end to that....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top