Time.news – On November 9, 1989, a Thursday fell, and this perhaps explains everything. Mikhail Sergevic Gorbachev was 58 that day. He had become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union four years earlier, at an age the PCUS at the time reserved for the most prominent leaders of the Komsomol, the Bolshevik youth.
He, on the other hand, had climbed the group of seniors at least a quarter of a century ahead of canonical times. This had made it easier at first, because the gerontocratic nomenklatura believed it an influential young man to maneuver in the opaque plots of the Kremlin. Instead he had made it clear immediately that his were not milk teeth. He noticed it when it was too late Andrei Gromyko, very powerful foreign minister and he was his first mentor: he too was the first to be defenestrated.
A ‘favorite’ of the West
The registry office, a more dynamic aspect of his Politburo colleagues, a wife with a captivating smile and a scholastic knowledge of English had made this young actor who placed himself at the center of the stage almost the favorite of a tired West of the Brezhnevian generation.
Even Margaret Thatcher, whom Gorbachev went to shortly after the election, called it “businesslike” and a better compliment, if given by the leading exponent of British mercantilism applied to international politics, could not have reached him. (Incidentally, Queen Elizabeth kept the point, because Gorbachev was the direct successor of those Bolsheviks who had shot his cousin Nicholas II in Yekaterinburg, and did not even want to receive him).
There were those who, in the throes of enthusiasm, considered him the one who would overcome Bolshevism. In short, a sort of Social Democrat, but the hypothesis was as reassuring as it was absurd. Gorbachev was a true son of his own world, only he realized that the stagnation of the Brezhnev era was destroying communism and the Soviet Union itself.
A change was needed, based on a twofold move: external relaxation, internal economic strengthening. Which was what Lenin had done at the dawn of the Revolution: peace of Brest-Litovsk and New Economic Policy.
Glasnost e perestrojka
Inside, the Kremlin initiated Glasnost and Perestroika: transparency in political and social processes plus restructuring of the system. Outside Paris, London, Berlin and Rome were coaxed with the call to a “common European home”. Above all: it was decided to close the age-old question of the Euromissiles with a mutual and total withdrawal, while trying to inoculate the corpaccione of the lifeless Soviet economy some shy germ of free enterprise.
Note that the NEP had been a failure and the Brest-Litovsk peace had led to the cession of Ukraine, the real backyard of the Holy Mother Russia. The ominous precedent was certainly known to Gorbachev, but it did not frighten him. Or rather: he scared him, but he was determined to take the risk. Because he truly loved the Soviet Union, and he would have done everything for it, even at the cost of endangering its very existence. True love is this: fate would have satisfied him.
To fully understand his drama (because the figure of Mikhail Sergevic Gorbachev is above all a dramatic figure) one can only start from an assumption. It was precisely his being that he came into the world in 1931 that made him the first general secretary of the CPSU to be born and raised in an entirely Bolshevik environment, without any reminiscence of the previous era.
The relationship with Bolshevism
The old Communist guard he had retired, on the other hand, had indirect but very clear memories of what had been before, and so perhaps he would be there again. Which is why she had a total but disenchanted relationship with Bolshevism, while he had only total one. In short, the same story imagined by Chesterton around that poet named Lucian Gregory, who comes one step away from his dream – to be co-opted into the European Anarchist Council with the code name of Thursday – only to discover that none of the councilors but nobody believes in anarchy any more than they would believe in a bowl of soup. How sad, the system was worse than unchangeable: it was a huge fake.
The chronicles tell how on the evening of November 9, 1989, on a Thursday, the Vopos guarding the Berlin Wall phoned the station, asking if they should fire on the crowd intent on picking. Central asked the Party in Pankow. The Party asked the Kremlin, and so it was Gorbachev who decided whether to renounce the Empire, as Lenin had renounced Ukraine, or to open an international crisis with probably terrifying consequences.
© The summit between Gorbachev and Bush on December 2, 1989
The summit between Gorbachev and Bush on December 2, 1989 which marked the end of the Cold War
He chose the first path, and one can only be grateful for it. Today, by virtue of that decision, Bolshevism no longer exists, the USSR does not exist, Germany is united and in the Kremlin sits a man who at the time was already working for the KGB: the pure power that never sets. The one who knows how to wait, knowing full well that the regimes must be lived with totality but also not without disenchantment.
As for him, he is still the least loved politician in all of Russia because he brought down its power. Unjust reasoning, because Gorbachev, at the moment of the most serious decisions, was able to demonstrate greatness dictated by pure affection for the line.
And if his ungrateful compatriots consider him – even today on the day of his death – a sort of Romulus Augustulus, we must cry out that no sir, he was not a gravedigger. He was not a traitor. He was not a liquidator and not even a Romulus Augustulus. He was much, much, more. It was Thursday.