Nobody is a prophet in his own country. The proverb perfectly sums up the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. The last President of the Soviet Union, who died on Tuesday August 30 at the age of 91, was cherished in the western world, which associates him closely with the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism in the early 1990s. From Washington to Berlin, via Paris or London, a shower of tributes fell on the former leader, “rare leader” and “man of peace whose decisions opened the way to freedom for Russians” to “change the course of history”.
>> Death of Mikhail Gorbachev: Follow world leaders’ reactions in our lives
His popularity was significantly lower in Russia, where leaders were less gushing on Tuesday night. “Vladimir Putin expresses his deep condolences after the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, he will send a telegram of condolences to the family and relatives in the morning,” said the Kremlin spokesman succinctly, quoted by the Cup press agency. “He was a statesman who had an enormous influence on the course of world history,” writes Vladimir Putin, without classifying this influence as positive. There will also be no state funeral organized by the Kremlin, according to several sources cited by the official agency Interfax.
The Kremlin’s minimal service following the death of Mikhail Gorbachev is not surprising, given the distrust that Vladimir Putin and the Russian public have shown him for several decades. In 2012, according to a poll by the state institute VTsIOM, he was named the most disliked Russian leader of the 20th century. Five years later, in a survey by the Levada Institute (in English), only 7% of Russians polled felt respect for him, compared to 32% for Stalin and 26% for Lenin.
How to explain the disinterest, even resentment, of the Russians towards the last President of the USSR? When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power the USSR in 1985, he had no idea what a controversial legacy he would bequeath to Russia. Withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, fight against alcoholism, resumption of dialogue with the countries west of the Berlin Wall… “Gorby” multiplies the democratization and opening-up projects of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s, which earned him the title “Man of the Decade”, awarded in 1989 by Time Magazine, American, i.e. western.
TIME named Gorbachev its “Man of the Decade” in the late 1980s, after the first sections of the Berlin Wall fell. Upon learning of this honor, Gorbachev told the aides that the magazine had missed the point. “It’s not about me. The scope of our design is global.”https://t.co/dBVCXOvSvU pic.twitter.com/YJjYrFVcJx
— Aman Batheja (@amanbatheja) August 30, 2022
Most notably, the Soviet leader received the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in warming relations between the Western and Soviet blocs; He was also careful not to support the collapse of the communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.
In Russia, the reforms of perestroika (‘reconstruction’) and glasnost (‘transparency’) did not really catch on in an empire less closed to Western influence in the 1980s. “The Russians have never forgiven him for believing in the sincerity of the West in the past. All this has led to terrible crises and that is the origin of the current crisis,” his former diplomat Vladimir Fedorovski estimated on Tuesday evening on franceinfo advisers .
“He will be a giant of 20th-century politics, even if he is hated in Russia today.”
Vladimir Fedorovski, former diplomatic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev
at franceinfo
Those nostalgic about this great Soviet power and its satellite states still make it out to have hastened the decline of the empire at the turn of the 1990s. Vladimir Putin himself estimated back in 2005 that the fall of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century”. In his tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, the current president also emphasizes the time the leader ruled more than his achievements: “He led our country at a time of complex and dramatic changes, from foreign policy to economic and social challenges.”
In his memoirs ten years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev somewhat acknowledged the relevance of this criticism: “We did not reform the Soviet Union in time. We did not transform the Communist Party into a modern democratic party in time. Those are the two main mistakes “. Mikhail Gorbachev’s “mistakes” led to an explosion of poverty for many Russians in the 1990s, combined with chaos embodied by the war in Chechnya. In 2018, according to the World Bank, was more than every second Russian economically insecure, with the situation in rural areas being particularly difficult.
However, not all Russians share the authorities’ relative indifference to Mikhail Gorbachev. Several progressives and opponents of Vladimir Putin have paid tribute to him since Tuesday night. “He was a great politician. Never before has there been so much freedom in Russia as in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That is his credit,” praised Russian journalist Mikhail Fishman.
“We are all orphans, but not everyone understands it yet,” said Alexei Venediktov, a friend of the former leader, who was director of a Moscow radio station before being landed in Ukraine for his critical coverage of the war. The latter reported at the end of July that the former head of state was “irritated” by the conflict triggered by the Kremlin in February.