With stoic eyes, the communist greats of yore stare motionless into the distance, or, like a noseless Stalin, at the ground. The statues in Moscow’s Muzeon Park are silent witnesses to the iconoclasm that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is the man many Russians still blame.
“He was the first president of our country, the man through whom my country, the Soviet Union, ceased to exist and fell apart into small principalities,” says Sergei, 46, who strolls among the marble colossi with his wife. Gorbachev, he said, was “not a patriot.” “He had the opportunity to change something in his country, but he chose to destroy it.”
Sergei, the son of an officer, expresses the feelings of many Russians. According to opinion polls over the decades, Gorbachev has been one of the least popular Russian leaders for years. In 1996, when he took part in the Russian presidential election, he obtained only 1 percent of the vote.
“In principle, that perestroika has brought no one any good,” Sergei says of Gorbachev’s reforms. ‘One became rich, the other poor. A third were simply murdered in the violence of the 1990s. I was also the victim of an armed robbery at the time, it was dangerous to go out on the street. Fortunately it is now quiet on that point.’
In Russia, the reaction to the death of 91-year-old Gorbachev was generally reserved, although some state media sites criticized his role as the last Soviet leader. President Putin has expressed his condolences to the bereaved, his spokesman Dmitri Peskov emphasized Gorbachev’s ‘historical role’, which has sparked ‘discussions’ in society.
Only representatives of the Communist Party were particularly vehement, who have also repeatedly said that the ‘traitor’ Gorbachev should be punished for his – in their view – destructive role.
Puppet
In Moscow’s Muzeon Park, not everyone is willing to talk about Gorbachev, even if the subject seems relatively ‘safe’ in the current context. An elderly woman who refuses to mention her name calls the deceased former president ‘a puppet’, but she refuses to say who or what.
Students Dasja and Natasha, both 21, stand in the Muzeon park next to the imposing image of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret service of the Soviet Union. The tearing down of this statue was one of the symbols of the failed coup d’état against Gorbachev in 1991. But the young women say they know nothing of the statues that surround them. Gorbachev was ahead of their time, and they know nothing about his historical role, or about the failed coup attempt against him. ‘Probably nothing would have changed if he hadn’t been there,’ Dasha thinks.
Anna, who is in high school, is five years younger, but significantly better informed. Gorbachev’s perestroika has not yet been treated at school, but she says in advance that she will not take everything for granted. “I don’t trust the school curriculum anyway,” she says. ‘You have to check everything. Also about Gorbachev. Because the older generation says they destroyed the Soviet Union, but they don’t. Because if there had been someone else in place of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union would have fallen apart.’
This is also confirmed by Michaïl, who experienced the demise of the Soviet Union and the communist system as a teenager, but at the time saw little of it. “In the context of what happened then, I think Gorbachev did everything more or less right. The Soviet Union did not fall apart because of him, but because of the accumulated internal contradictions; that totalitarian system simply could no longer survive.’ Even if he had wanted to, Gorbachev could not have done anything to prevent it, Mikhail said.
The Muscovites will have the opportunity to pay their last respects to Gorbachev on Saturday. The last Soviet leader will then be laid out in the imposing column room of the House of Trade Unions, right next to the State Duma, the Russian House of Commons. Virtually all previous Soviet leaders have been brought to their final resting place from here, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.
For Gorbachev, that final resting place will be the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, where his wife Raisa has been buried since 1999. She was also far from popular at the time; nevertheless thousands of Russians came to pay her last respects.
human rights
Gorbachev, life without Raisa was difficult. “He loved his wife more than his job,” fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitri Muratov said in a video message following Gorbachev’s death. “And human rights were more important to him than the rights of the state.”
Muratov and Gorbachev were close friends for over thirty years. Gorbachev co-founded the newspaper Novaja Gazeta, of which Muratov is editor-in-chief. Gorbachev bought the first twenty computers for the editors with money from his Nobel Prize, says Muratov, who calls Gorbachev ‘a great humanist’. “He released political prisoners, he ended the war in Afghanistan, he stopped the nuclear arms race.”
“Gorbachev despised war,” Muratov said. “He despised Realpolitik. He was convinced that the practice of solving world problems by force should be a thing of the past.” Gorbachev has given the world ‘thirty years of peace’. “But that’s over. And there won’t be any more such gifts.’