Putin once called the dissolution of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century’. He is therefore doing everything possible to undo this ‘catastrophe’, encouraged by a whole trio of bloodthirsty nationalist ideologues, such as Aleksandr Dugin, cherished by our own Baudet as a related genius, whose equally bloodthirsty daughter was recently killed in a bomb attack. the way has been cleared. He who reigns by the sword will perish by the sword – as a devout Christian Dugin will no doubt be familiar with this phrase from the Gospel of Matthew.
The Kremlin is openly seeking not only the restoration of the Soviet Union, but also that of the old Russian pre-1989 position of power, which means that the interests of all western neighbors – from Finland to Romania – must be subordinated to those of Moscow again. to be made.
Putin considers the deceased Mikhail Gorbachev last week to be primarily responsible for the catastrophe in question: he would have given away everything that Stalin – meanwhile restored as a great patriot – as a result of sentimental weakness. That view is not without reason widespread, and at the same time it is not correct.
Yeltsin
Gorbachev had no intention of ‘handing over’ the Eastern European satellites to the West or of dissolving the Soviet Union when he took office, and even afterwards (and de facto it was not his fault, but thanks to Yeltsin). . He wanted to save the Soviet Union by reforming it. That that turned out to be impossible, and that his reform attempt would end in ruin—perhaps: have to fail—was something he hadn’t foreseen. Nor, for that matter, were most Western Kremlinologists, who were equally surprised by the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Had Gorbachev foreseen this outcome, or at least calculated it into account, it is doubtful whether he would have started his reforms and have also been able to persevere in the crucial early years. His historical merit does not lie in the fact that he himself broke down the Soviet empire, but that, once the stone was set in motion, he did not try to prevent it by force: the Eastern Europeans were now free to decide their future. to decide.
The fact that he was able to leave such a strong mark on these reforms, and at the same time fail to prevent their undesirable consequences, was because his position as party leader was still strong enough for the first, and not anymore for the second. With his own reforms, he had unintentionally weakened not only Russia’s international position, but also, through the resistance it provoked internally, his own. And at the same time, that opposition was only strong enough to push him aside – with that half-hearted coup attempt – when it was already too late.
Paradox
That is the paradox of Gorbachev’s historical significance: still powerful enough to bring about enormous changes, no longer powerful enough to prevent the inadvertently ensuing much greater changes. Namely that with the communist dictatorship, the international constellation with vassal regimes in Eastern Europe would automatically disappear.
In retrospect, it is an interesting question why Gorbachev did not foresee, or could not have foreseen, this outcome. An important factor is undoubtedly that before that, despite all his own criticism of its functioning, he was at the same time to a large extent the product of the Soviet system and the accompanying Soviet worldview and thus Soviet education. An important element of this, now revived by Putin with the new Stalin-worship, was the Great Patriotic War against fascist Germany in 1941-1945 and the associated liberation of the Eastern European countries from the clutches of the Third Reich.
As a result, Gorbachev believed in fact just as much as his opponents did in the Soviet myth of the brotherhood of peoples under Russian leadership, as it had been inculcated for decades on every Soviet subject through the ubiquitous state propaganda. No one, even the most critical mind, can completely escape the cliché images present as permanent mental background noise that every nation cherishes of itself and its own history, and which permanently visibly and invisibly permeate a country’s political culture.
VOC mentality
Just as, for example, almost all of The Hague in 1945 held on to a romantic self-image of its colonial ‘vocation’ in the Indies (Balkenende’s famous ‘VOC mentality’ was a late regurgitation of it) and Churchill has always remained a British imperialist raised in Victorian times. , for whom the interests of the Empire took precedence over democratic self-determination.
And just as Roosevelt — by no means the dumbest by any means — actually automatically assumed that America, given the lofty ideals of its Founding Fathers, objectively represented the interests of all humanity, so that at Yalta he seriously came up with a proposal for general disarmament. With the exception of one country, of course, the United States, which would act as a neutral, selfless guardian of the new UN-embodied world order. The facial expressions of Churchill and Stalin afterwards have unfortunately not survived.
In the same vein, Gorbachev probably believed that even after the end of Russian coercion, the Poles and Czechs, in gratitude for their liberation in 1945, would voluntarily remain allies. He probably realized too late that their interpretation of Stalin’s international role in those years was different from that proclaimed for decades from the Kremlin.
Thomas von der Dunk is a cultural historian.