So long, Gorby, and thanks for nothing

Gorbachev in Vilnius, 1990

Gorby didn't stay in the news cycle very long.  Still, I was surprised the eulogies were so one sided in the Western press.  Here in the East, he is not so well respected.  Certainly not in Lithuania.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about Gorbachev other than he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.  This wasn't by design.  Gorby wanted to remake the USSR into a kinder, gentler nation, to borrow a campaign slogan from George H.W. Bush, only to see the entire country implode.  When Lithuania chose to secede in March, 1990, he did everything in his power to try to nullify this bid.  He even traveled to Vilnius on a very rare state visit to try to convince the breakaway republic to return to the Soviet fold.

This would have been fine as far as the rest of the world was concerned.  No country recognized Lithuania's independence bid, although Lithuanians saw it as a restoration of their former state.  Only the fellow Soviet republic of Moldavia, which had declared its independence that summer, recognized Lithuania as an independent country.  Gorbachev then did what any tyrant would do, try to starve the two breakaway republics into submission.  He cut off gas supplies, and rendered a blockade on food supplies.  The only problem with the latter is that Lithuania and Moldavia supplied most of their own food and were able to withstand the totalitarian action.  

Unknowingly, Gorbachev had opened up a Pandora's box with his so-called reforms.  These countries never willingly joined the Soviet Union.  Moldavia was cleaved off from Romania and forcibly annexed, much the way Russia is trying to take the Donbas today.  Lithuania had been a proud independent country between the wars, before falling to the Soviet Union not once but twice.  The first as a result of the secret agreements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the latter as the spoils of war.  When Gorbachev called for glasnost, all these agreements were re-examined and it became very clear that the Soviet Union was built on very shaky foundations.  Looking at it another way, "Perestroika will destroy ya," to paraphrase a line from The Kinks.

Gorby did his best to try to hold the crumbling union together, but soon other republics were threatening to secede, including Russia itself.  Boris Yeltsin rose to the fore as the new leader of the Russian republic, promising to reinstate gas supplies to Lithuania if Gorbachev wouldn't do so.  It was a confusing and tumultuous period.  No one really saw it coming, and as a result weren't prepared to deal with the aftermath.  People couldn't even tell who was leading the Soviet Union, Gorbachev or Yeltsin? The Soviet Union and Russia had always been considered synonymous. The US offered its support for Gorbachev, asking the breakaway republics to be patient.

For Lithuania this was Yalta all over again.  The US and NATO countries were trying to figure out what to do with Saddam Hussein.  They didn't have time to deal with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was ironic given that the entire purpose of NATO was to neutralize the Soviet Union.  The US and UN had never recognized the annexation of the Baltic States, yet here they were unwilling to recognize Lithuania's independence bid, as well as that of Moldavia.

Gorby sensed he could sneak his military forces into Vilnius and quietly snuff out this independence bid while the US and NATO countries were embroiled in Iraq.  What he didn't count on was the international press.  Bush had made it very difficult for the press to get access to the Gulf War, so the press turned to the Baltics. It quickly picked up on the January invasion, running stories in all the major news outlets and on television.  This was a black eye for Gorby, who had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  If he carried through with this invasion, his good standing in the West would evaporate just like that.  

So, he pulled back, much to the chagrin of the Soviet Communist Party, which couldn't afford to lose anymore ground to the West after its former satellite countries had all broken away in 1989, effectively ending the Warsaw Pact.  This was no great statesman, no great visionary.  This was a failed leader who was watching his country fragment right before his eyes.  Embittered by his inability to rein in two tiny Soviet Republics, the Communist Party staged its own coup, but the CPSU was in such disarray that it was unable to do anything more than briefly detain Gorbachev at his dacha.  Their attempt to kidnap Yelstin failed spectacularly, and at that point the CPSU crumbled. Gorby along with them.

Gorbachev probably would have been forgotten in the aftermath had not he continued to promote himself in the West.  It helped that Yeltsin was a rough and tumble man, prone to drinking and impromptu dancing, completely unprepared for the enormous task that had befallen him.  Gorby could still be seen as the statesman.

I remember vacationing in Sardinia and getting into an argument with a German professor over Gorbachev.  A Socialist himself, the old professor thought it tragic that Gorby couldn't hold the Soviet Union together, as it would have been better for everyone involved.  Not for Lithuania, I said with a wry smile.  Well, maybe not for the Baltics, he stammered, recognizing their previous independence, but he didn't believe any of these other breakaway republics had any legitimacy, echoing Gorbachev's words.

Gorbachev was not loved in Ukraine either.  The republic pressed for its independence in the summer of 1991, telling Gorby to "Go Home," when he tried to appeal to their shared heritage.  The same went with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and so on.  No one wanted to be part of the Soviet Union or Russia.  These republics demanded their right to self determination.  We were just blithely unaware in the West, as we never saw these republics as anything other than part of the Soviet Union.

The map would have to be redrawn.  For hardline communists and their socialist allies in the West this was a bitter pill. The Soviet Union would no longer serve as a counterweight to American imperialism.  There was only one superpower now, and for many European intellectuals this was a great tragedy.

This is why we see today all this love for Putin's Russia.  These same deluded intellectuals believe that Russia is the natural successor to the Soviet Union.  They see Russia as the only country capable of neutralizing American greed.  They concoct all sorts of fallacious stories about how these embattled parts of Ukraine have always been part of Russia, forgetting that all the oblasts of Ukraine voted en masse to be independent from the Soviet Union, and become part of the new republic of Ukraine when it declared its independence in August, 1991.

Here in lies the legacy of Gorbachev, a man who lost a nation, out of which new nations were born in spite of him.  He is universally loathed in the East.  You will find few persons who honor his legacy.  Russian hardliners see him as an abject failure for allowing the Soviet Union to break apart.  Lithuanians, Moldovans and Ukrainians see him as a pathetic shell of a man, who pitched his reforms without subscribing to them himself.  He had no intention of creating an open transparent government.  He just wanted to revitalize the image of the Soviet Union and hopefully gain new trade agreements with Western countries to help overcome the economic collapse in the USSR following its remarkable failure in Afghanistan.  This was taken straight from the Khrushchev playbook.  Only problem was that the Soviet Union was too far gone at this point and there was no turning back.