Between 1985 and 1991, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to change everything only to, in the end, lose everything. Having set out to reform the Soviet Union beyond recognition, he ended up dismantling it. Whatever you think about the Soviet Union, a leader of a state whose policies rapidly induce its literal end is usually considered a failure.
Gorbachev, gifted with a certain charisma, was initially popular at home and in the West, but subsequently only in the West. Whereas Westerners kept liking him – his bizarrely naïve trust in their promises and benevolence played its part there – his own countrymen and women became disillusioned by his grating combination of grandiloquent rhetoric and abysmal economic failure.
Toward the end, when coup plotters were kind – or incompetent – enough to merely put him under house arrest, no one cared much either way. Gorbachev pulled off the remarkable feat of being defeated by a coup that failed.
Don’t get me wrong: I still believe that history will judge the last Soviet leader critically but, on the whole, kindly. With all his flaws – intellectual vanity paired with almost childish credulity perhaps the worst – and the severe errors he committed, he was fundamentally humane, reasonable, and sincere. For a politician especially, that’s a lot. And we owe him more than anyone else that the first Cold War ended peacefully. If only the current American elites were capable of producing someone as principally rational as Gorbachev! Such a leader could help them make the overdue adjustment to their country’s relative decline and the emerging multipolar order.
Also, Gorbachev was neither a natural born authoritarian – his terminal reforms were motivated by a genuine desire to make his country more, not less democratic – nor a self-obsessed egomaniac putting his personal narcissism and obstinacy above the common, national good. Which brings us to the current president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky.
Zelensky is no Gorbachev, obviously. And yet, looking at Zelensky, I cannot help thinking........