Gorbachev destroyed the old system without creating a new one and that was, to many Russians, unforgivable.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Kremlin chief who brought on the end of the Cold War—and, with it, the collapse of the Soviet Union—died on Tuesday at the age of 91. The only thing more remarkable than his towering accomplishments while in office may be his utter irrelevance in the decades since.century. The reforms that he instigated, soon after taking over as general secretary of the Communist Party in the spring of 1985, were staggering.
This was Gorbachev’s tragedy: He thought he could make the Soviet Union more Western—letting in free ideas and free markets—while retaining the Communist Party’s grip on its politics. But the Party couldn’t survive the shocks; it couldn’t be thoroughly reformed without falling apart. This was the lesson that other authoritarian leaders, especially in China, learned by watching from afar: reform the economy first,the politics.
Gorbachev too had played a heroic, though less public, role while in captivity, resisting the putschists’ demands to resign as the USSR’s President and sign over power to them. But by the time the putschists were arrested and Gorbachev flew back to Moscow, the country had changed more than he could have foreseen. In his returning speech, he continued to laud the productive role of the Communist Party; he expected to resume the steady course of his reforms.
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