Down, If Not Out: Still, He Helped to Change the World

Mikhail S. Gorbachev said many times that he did not become president of the Soviet Union in order to preside over its dissolution. In the end, of course, he did just that, letting loose a tidal force of change that was to accelerate a collapse already long under way.

Though none of what has brought the former Soviet Union to its present point was planned, much of it can be seen to have been predestined, the inevitable outgrowth of the reforms that Gorbachev sought to direct.

Gorbachev had hoped to save the tottering Soviet system by forcing through certain radical if not always clearly conceived measures to salvage and reconstruct it. Instead, his perestroika succeeded mainly in revealing that Soviet communism’s inner structure was so rotted as to be beyond hope of refurbishment or salvation. That was his unintended achievement. And along the way, he helped to change the world.

For what Gorbachev saw and acknowledged--with a candor none of his predecessors could muster--was that military competition with the United States had become pointless and unaffordable, and must end if his country was ever to prosper and allow its people the better life they had for generations been promised. From that realization other consequences irresistibly flowed.

The first was in the area of arms control. After decades of deadlock and inaction, sweeping agreements to reduce arsenals of both strategic and conventional arms were reached with the United States and Western Europe. Almost overnight, it seemed, the specter of nuclear war that had haunted the world for 40 years dimmed and faded away.

New security arrangements with the West and acceptance of the political realities underlying them helped speed the end of the hegemonic role the Soviet Union had maintained in Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. The word from the Kremlin went out: No longer would Moscow provide the muscle to support the repressive communist regimes it had put in power. Within months, in Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Romania and Bulgaria, the old order crumbled. What had once been feared as a monolith quickly fell into fragments. Germany was reunited, the Warsaw Pact dissolved itself, Soviet troops began trekking home from foreign soil. Never officially declared, the Cold War was over.

In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, a new cold war was under way. Communist Party stalwarts had from the start resisted the changes promoted by Gorbachev and other reformers. As state controls were eased, that resistance deepened. High officials, bureaucrats and others desperate to hold on to their jobs, their perquisites, their powers did all they could to sabotage the processes of change.

Gorbachev himself seemed unable to make up his mind how far and how fast he should move with his reforms; like Lenin groping for political effectiveness, he seemed ever ready to take one step back for every two steps he took forward. But this was not just pragmatic politics. In time it became all too clear that while Gorbachev knew where he wanted to go--his goal was an economically stronger, more politically relaxed country--neither he nor his advisers really knew how to get there. Floundering, he soon found himself losing all control and under attack from virtually every quarter. Last August, conservatives tried to overthrow him in a coup. Since then an odd combination of nationalists and liberals has simply thrust him aside. In the end, with the collapse of his last-gasp effort to form a new union, he had become irrelevant, a president without anything to preside over, a leader scorned by a people he had worked to set free.

A failure? Yes, in the sense that he proved unable to manage the vast changes that he did so much to set in motion, and unable to translate his ambitions for economic modernization into a coherent program and visible achievement. That is not, though, how history will most remember Mikhail Gorbachev. For all of his faults and shortcomings, he did make the decision to liberate his country from the lies, the cruelties and the destructive self-deceptions it had for so long lived with, and he did leave Eastern Europe a freer place, and the world generally a safer place, than when he took power in 1985. Planned or not, selfless or not, that will remain a notable legacy.