Rescuing Gorbachev from the Memory Hole

Abstract

The recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev prompted many tributes to the former Soviet leader’s signal achievements in democratizing the USSR, ending the Cold War, and permitting the peaceful collapse of empire. However, a number of prominent pundits have attacked Gorbachev in post mortems that are factually flawed, internally contradictory, and deeply ahistorical. Descriptions of Gorbachev as a “quintessential apparatchik,” a bloody “totalitarian,” and a dyed-in-the wool defender of “Russian empire” tell more about the present biases of their authors than they do about the past dramas of perestroika and the Cold War’s end. Unfortunately, the coincidence of Gorbachev’s death in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine seems to have unleashed a Russophobia that unfairly stains Gorbachev’s remarkable legacy.