To anyone who met or simply read about Mikhail Gorbachev, the most dumbfounding takeaway was how the last head of the Soviet Union — and a pivotal figure at the end of the Cold War — could be so lionized on the world stage and so loathed in his country.
As news broke Tuesday night that the remarkable Russian had died at age 91, the post-mortems on Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev were as they were during his life: hailed in just about every world capital as the visionary who, albeit reluctantly, presided the downfall of Communism and ushered in a new (and reduced in size) Russia — except in his own capital city of Moscow.
"Gorbachev was not popular in Russia because he was blamed for destroying the Soviet Union and his reforms did not bring prosperity," David Satter, former Financial Times Correspondent in Moscow and author of six books on Russia, told Newsmax.
"To put it simply and bluntly, he was the one ultimately responsible for destroying the country, instead of reforming it, and bringing total chaos and innumerable socio-economic calamities to millions of people of the former USSR and their communities," added a prominent Russian now living in the U.S. who met Gorbachev several times (and who requested anonymity) to Newsmax.
Ronald Reagan, whose policies were key to bringing down Communism in Russia, first heard of Gorbachev in December of 1984, when British Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, visited him at his weekend retreat of Camp David.
"She had just told me of a meeting with an up-and-coming member of the Soviet Politburo named Mikhail Gorbachev who, she said, expressed strong Soviet reservations over the SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative]," Reagan wrote in his memoirs.
Four months later, on March 11, Reagan was awakened at 4 a.m. to be told Russian leader Konstantin Chernenko died. He was the third leader in Moscow to have died since Reagan became president in 1981 and, as he wrote in his diary the same day, "[w]ord had been received that Gorbachev had been named head man in the Soviet Union."
He also told wife Nancy: "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"
Reagan did, of course, correspond frequently with the new boss at the Kremlin and eventually held summits on arms control with his Soviet counterpart. True to what Thatcher had told him more than two years earlier, Reagan discovered at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1987 that Gorbachev wanted him to give in on SDI before they finalized an arms control agreement. The U.S. president flatly refused and the summit collapsed.
Reagan addressed the nation and explained how the U.S. nearly had an arms agreement until Gorbachev killed it over the single issue of SDI. A Wall Street Journal poll showed that public approval of Reagan's summit performance was a resounding 71% to 16% disapproval.
Just over a year later, Reagan and Gorbachev were talking about human rights in Russia. On-site inspections, an issue left unanswered in nuclear summitry going back to the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, was agreed to. In 1991, after a string of eastern bloc countries overthrew their Communist slave masters, the Soviet Union itself had fallen and Gorbachev was out of a job.
Gorbachev almost certainly accelerated the process that put him and the Soviet Union out of power. His policies of "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness) paved the way for a more open political system. But it did not help Gorbachev.
In 1996, after five years out of power and against the advice of his family, he sought the presidency of the Russian Federation in a crowded race that included his onetime ally Boris Yeltsin. He ended up with 0.5% of the vote.
Telling friends that he saw himself as France's Charles de Gaulle being called back to power after years in the wilderness, Gorbachev in 2007 launched a new party known as the Union of Social Democrats. Its goal was to become a major political party in four years but it never got off the ground. A year later, he tried to form a new Independent Democratic Party of Russia but it never materialized.
Because he lived in Russia, Gorbachev was limited in what he could say about President Vladimir Putin. But sources close to Gorbachev said he loathed the strongman in the Kremlin and, as Alexei Venediktov told the Russian Forbes Magazine, he felt his glasnost reforms and vision of an open society "were all destroyed… zilch, zero, ashes."
Friends also agreed that the winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize was "upset" by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and his Gorbachev Foundation issued a statement earlier this year calling for "an early cessation of hostilities and immediate start of peace negotiations."
"Mikhail Gorbachev, cooperating with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, negotiated an end to the Cold War and tamed a dangerous arms race," Jack Matlock, who served as ambassador to Moscow under Reagan and Bush, told Newsmax. "He then liberated the Soviet Union from its Communist dictatorship, freeing its peoples to build a democratic future. He should be remembered for his achievements and not for the failures of his successors."
Reagan and several others suspected Gorbachev, at one point, might become a Christian. As Russian president, he began the loosening of religious restrictions. Rumors of his conversion to Catholicism were fueled in March 2008, after a visit to the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi. But Gorbachev moved to dispel the rumors, telling the Russian news agency Interfax: "To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist."
Although no one knows what he believed in this twilight days, it is poignant that perhaps the best summation of Gorbachev and his achievements should come from the New Testament: "For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country" (John 4:44).
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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