Gorbachev secured his place in history by what he didn't do. While never endorsing the end of the eastern bloc, he made it clear beginning in the late 1980's that unlike his predecessors, he would not oppose democratic reforms in Eastern Europe by force. To general astonishment, he kept this promise, and with the regrettable exception of Lithuania this commitment to not repeating the crimes of his predecessors is Gorbachev's greatest legacy. In 1988 you would have been hard pressed to find anyone who could imagine the mostly peaceful collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but Gorbachev had the moral courage to accept this once unimaginable consequence of his policy and to see it through.
Mikhail Gorbachev has died
61–70 of 971 posts
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#62People are complicated beings. He was a part decent man, part criminal and part coward.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#63Gorba, the Chief.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#64RIP. I did my college essay on Gorbachev. Still think the Cold War was the greatest urgent threat to humanity and welcome any moves to end it, failures and all
I guess it feels so good when you get all the benefits and somebody else foots the failures.
Well, 2022 is a year of boomerang.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#65The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…
No post body was provided.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#66Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#67I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
Reagan didn't end the cold war. He applied economic pressure, which created the conditions that allowed the cold war to end.
Gorbachev played the critical part. He let the East European satellite states go rather than sending troops to restore status quo. Within the USSR, his reforms gave the democratic opposition some room to breathe. Once Gorbachev's power started to fail, that allowed the opposition to win, rather than the hardliners who attempted a coup.
With another kind of leader on the opposite side, Reagan's policies could have won but not ended the cold war. The USSR could have become something like North Korea, but much bigger. It would have been stable but no longer a global superpower. (That may also be where Russia is headed today, as there are no viable alternatives to Putin's regime.)
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#68He really changed the world. Ended the cold war, an incredibly important figure in 20th Century history. One of the few decent people in Russian politics.
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a disconnect here: the US policy in question took place over decades, not the 8 years that Reagan was president.
It's easy to argue that it's USSR people, not Western, who benefited most from the end of the Cold War.
Are you responding to the right comment? That's sort of unrelated to the GP's remark (that Ronald Reagan can be credited with ending the Cold War).
(It's also hard to assert that generally: Russia is by many metrics worse off than it was under the USSR, while most of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe is better off.)
Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died
#70As the Russian, I'm of the opinion that Gorbachev is traitor.
I hate communism, so it's good that he helped us to get rid of that.
But why getting rid of communism had to include letting Americans to take reign in many government agencies of Russia?
What would be your opinion of US president, if he goes to to retire in Russia?
I'm reading some Russian news site, and almost universally Gorbachev is hated by Russians.