Opinion: Gorbachev Deserves Better from the West and Russia
Memories of the Day New York Went Wild for Gorbachev
Want to read a balanced perspective on the news? Please subscribe to A View from the Center for free. I won't clutter your inbox, just send you one or two new posts every week. Also, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where we get into some pretty good discussions. And please support independent journalism by sharing this with friends!
The world lost one of the most significant figures of the past century on Tuesday, and none of the evening newscasts of the big three American broadcast networks bothered to make his passing their lead story.
Mikhail Gorbachev died at age 91 in Moscow. He was the last leader of the Soviet Union, a man whose monumental achievement was to help end the Cold War without bloodshed.
Even so, the evening news shows buried his story, and 52% of my university students couldn’t identify him on quizzes that asked what former Soviet leader had died this week.
Conveying the importance of this man to a younger generation is a challenge, even though Gorbachev’s life proved the “Great Man Theory” isn’t dead, and that his countryman Leo Tolstoy was wrong in dismissing how major leaders can drive the course of world events.
I tried to have my students connect to Gorbachev by telling them that I am a child of the Cold War, son of parents who left Cuba when Fidel Castro chose communism and an alliance with the Soviets.
And I told them of a night in New York in 1988 that remains one of the highlights of my life.
On the evening of December 7 of that year, temperatures were in the 50s, so I decided to walk the 25 blocks home from my office at Third Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan. On the way, I stopped to buy something at the Bloomingdale’s department store. When I exited, I faced not only the expected rush-hour traffic jam and crowd of pedestrians, but also a cacophony of blaring police sirens.
Suddenly, a huge motorcade arrived outside the store, and out of a limousine, no more than 15 to 20 feet away, appeared Mikhail Gorbachev.
New Yorkers normally hate visits by American and foreign dignitaries because they make a mess of the already horrific traffic. That was not the case on that late fall day in 1988. The crowd, including me, cheered.
Gorbachev had earlier walked into a crowd outside a theater on Broadway, and an Associated Press article back then quoted one witness as saying, ″The crowd was just going hysterical. It was fantastic, truly something fantastic to see someone like that up close.″
The Soviet leader was then a few years into his twin policies of “perestroika” (restructuring the USSR’s economic and political system) and “glasnost” (openness) that brought hope to the West, amid decades of a climate of fear generated by the worldwide ideological battle between capitalism and communism.
In New York for the “Governor’s Island Summit” with then U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush, Gorbachev’s visit delivered a powerful message that real change was possible. Less than a year later, the Berlin Wall would fall and the Iron Curtain would begin to lift.
To young people today, the Iron Curtain is an abstraction in history books, not the frightening reality we Baby Boomers grew up with, a world where much of Europe was isolated from the West, and where the threat of mutually assured destruction cast a shadow over daily life.
Gorbachev brought hope that night. Today, the world is safer, and most of the countries that suffered behind the Iron Curtain are democracies and members of NATO.
Still, we’ve begun to forget a man who, as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “exemplified how a single statesman can change the world for the better.”
Worse yet, in Russia itself, many who mourn the old USSR have rejected Gorbachev’s legacy. One 2012 survey even ranked him as the most unpopular Russian leader of the past century. The Guardian reports that a 2021 poll found that more than 70% of Russians said their country had moved in a negative direction during his rule. Incredibly, a 2017 Pew Research survey found that Russians prefer genocidal leader Josef Stalin to Gorbachev by a wide margin. Imagine that: They prefer one of history’s worst mass murderers, responsible for the gulags and the Holodomor famine in Ukraine that killed millions, to the man who may have saved millions by ending the Cold War.
Now, another Russian leader, an anti-Gorbachev, has steered his country into a new genocide in Ukraine. While Gorbachev overcame Soviet indoctrination to make the world a better place, we are seeing how another Soviet son of the Cold War, former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin, has done the opposite.
I ended up walking home that December evening 44 years ago with strangers, excitedly talking about hope, the hope brought to New York and the world by that leader with a huge red birthmark on his forehead.
Thank you, Mr. Gorbachev, for helping tear down the Berlin Wall and ending the Cold War. We can only pray that your successor in the Kremlin will follow your example of peace.
Cover photo: After a meeting in New York, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, U.S. Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev pose with the World Trade Center towers in the background on December 7, 1988. (Bettman/Getty Images)
Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. You can also do so on my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/antoniomoraTV1/). Please subscribe (it's free) and share the link: https://aviewfromthecenter.bulletin.com/subscribe.