Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (March 2, 1931 – August 30, 2022), the last leader of the Soviet Union, died Tuesday at the age of ninety-one at a hospital in Moscow, Russia. Gorbachev served as president until the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in December 1991, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in decreasing East-West political tensions.
Immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev founded the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, more commonly known as "The Gorbachev Foundation,” which continues to function today. He also wrote several books, including his most recent, What Is at Stake Now: My Appeal for Peace and Freedom, published in 2020 by Polity Books.
Mikhail Gorbachev also wrote for The Progressive.
In August 2009, in an article titled “Get Rid of Your Nukes,” he said, “One of the most urgent problems of today’s world is the danger of nuclear weapons . . . . Nothing fundamentally new has been achieved in the area of nuclear disarmament in the past decade and a half.” In February 2010, he returned with a column called “Capitalism Needs Perestroika” (referring to the reform movement within the Soviet Communist Party that Gorbachev helped launch in the late 1980s).
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Perestroika postage stamp, 1988
“Many politicians of my generation sincerely believed that with the end of the Cold War, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dispense with dangerous regional conflicts, abandon sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden century of collective security,” the former Soviet leader wrote. “Alas, over the last few decades the world has not become a fairer place.”
In November 2009, his comments were also presented in an op-ed for our Progressive Media Project on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Today’s global economic crisis has revealed the organic defects of the present model of Western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible. It has showed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism was in need of profound democratic reform,” penned the man best known as the reformer of a decades-old system in what had been the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev appeared directly two other times in The Progressive. The first was in a full-length interview in December 2003, conducted by then-managing editor Amitabh Pal—who traveled to a bar in Appleton, Wisconsin, home of famous anti-communists the John Birch Society as well as the late Senator Joe McCarthy, to corner the former politician after he had given a lecture at Lawrence University. “I’m still committed to the socialist idea,” Gorbachev told him. “Because the socialist idea, correctly understood, includes the principles of freedom and social justice . . . . When we speak about social justice, it means that freedom should be used not only in the interest of profit, but also in the interest of the advancement of the people who create all values.”
The second time Gorbachev appeared was on a film clip accompanying Ed Rampell’s review of Werner Herzog and André Singer’s 2019 biopic Meeting Gorbachev. “There are those who don’t understand the importance of cooperation. There should be no place for such people in politics,” the then-eighty-eight-year-old intones, thinking back on the turmoil that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and all of its client states. At the end, Herzog asks him, “What should be on your gravestone?” “Мы устали [We tried],” Gorbachev replies in Russian.