How can he be charged with treason against a state which no longer exists?
Gorbachev was a realist, more so than being a politician. He literally did himself out of a job. Before I could tell you how heroic he was, I’d have to know how much of that was intentional. I suspect not as much of it as one would think, considering he was caught flatfooted by a coup attempt that only failed because the Army didn’t wanna go back to being Soviets.
Sure, he did great things, and his place in history is assured. But I’m not sure I’d call him a hero. History generally makes decisions like that.
As to Deng Xiaoping… well, he came in after the Cultural Revolution. Friggin’ Attila the Hun would have looked good compared to predecessors like Deng had…
I think the whole Soviet leadership was caught flatfooted by what the people actually did with their glasnost. They had spend decades convincing themselves that the system was a lot more popular than it was. That’s what happens when you stifle free speech – you can’t know what the people really think.
The Chinese are a pretty sensible people individually. But collectively, they seem to go crazy every now and then. Chinese history is just full of fanatical ideological movements and rebellions. Some began as religious movements, which explains why the PRC is so down on the Falun Gong.
That said, the CR wasn’t all that bad as such things go, body count merely in the hundreds of thousands. The Great Leap Forward, now . . .
It is worthwhile to compare three reformist Asian autocrats who knew each other:
Deng Xiaoping - China
Lee Kuan Yew - Singapore
Chiang Ching-kuo - Taiwan
The comparison is made in this biography:
The Generalissimo’s Son: Chiang Ching-kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan
All violated human rights. And of the three, only Chiang Ching-kuo dared to put his country on the road to full-throttled democracy.
Nitpick: “Full-throated.” (Yes, that has pornographic evocations to modern minds, but it is the traditional phrase.)
At least, that’s the impression I get from Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China (1922).
I do wonder how much has changed since then, and how far Russell’s observations would still apply to the present generation of Chinese.
Mod note: WAY to much quoting redacted.
I strongly disagree. He was instrumental in bringing in glasnost and perestroika which was the foundation of the revolution that brought down the Soviets. He was able work with Reagan.
The Cold War ended with relatively little bloodshed. The Iron Curtain fell and outside of the Balkans it has largely been peaceful. In 1985 you would have been called crazy to predict that outcome over the next ten years.
It’s not proof of anything but Gorbachev won plenty of peace prizes including the Nobel. He might have had a wider positive impact than any of the other peace-makers on my list
Did anyone actually starve to death, and how much of this was simply more realistic accounting of a bullshit economic system?
The argument for Gorbachev - and Mandela as well, incidentally - boils down to this; had you told be prior to the events they are known for that the Soviet or South African system could be dismantled without full-out war, I’d never have believed you.
I don’t think the Soviet system should have been ‘dismantled’ (though I would certainly have liked to see it reformed.) It’s precisely the fact that he dismantled the system that makes him such a horrifically bad leader (and arguably guilty of treason, though that would depend on what his intentions were, and whether he was malicious or just incompetent).
And the ‘accounting’ of the size of the Soviet economy in 1989 that I’m using here comes from the dreaded nest of communists at the CIA.
As for ‘starving to death’, there was certainly a lot of malnutrition after the collapse, as well as a massive decline in living standards and things like life expectancy. You started seeing beggars in Russian cities, which you wouldn’t have done before 1989. (Not incidentally, Belarus, which stayed the closest to the centrally planned Soviet model, also endured a much milder economic decline than most of the other republic.) Its not really controversial that Russia between about 1991 and 2000 was a terrible place to live, though of course there was also a class of rich people who profited very handsomely from the fall of communism.
The US surrendering to Japan and Germany would have ended World War II, but that doesn’t mean it would be a good thing. Sometimes there are more important things than peace.
I think my argument here is pretty simple: I think Gorbachev was a terrible leader, who took a flawed system and ended up destroying it in favour of something immeasurably worse. And in so doing, seriously harmed the left all over the world, most especially in the developing world. I’m not sure he was guilty of treason, because I don’t know if he knew how things would turn out. I can see why a lot of former Soviet citizens disagree though.
You think the fall of Soviet communism hurt the developing world? Just the end of the proxy wars between the US and USSR was a boon, let alone the end of Marxist/Stalinist policies.
Is what the post-Soviet states have now really “immeasurably worse” than the Soviet Communist system?
Depends what communist era you’re talking about, but I’d say in most regards they’re worse off than in the Brezhnev era (and of course immeasurably better off than in the Stalin era).
Haven’t we learned yet that the left took a wrong turn in 1917? For decades the repressive, dogmatic, undemocratic and inefficient Leninist-Stalinist model of the USSR was almost the only model for a functioning leftist state, and leftists like Castro and Mao copied it as a matter of course even when they didn’t have to. The end of the USSR frees the world’s leftists to explore alternative forms.
BrainGlutton, this post was way too much quoting. Those interested can click the link. Please don’t go overboard like this again.
He has the opinion that it is a bad thing that the Soviets no longer exists. I think this says all that needs to be said. It is not possible for someone with such a view to confront the reality that the soviet system could not actually function except with repression to hold together. So the metrics like the gini are used out of a context to put make-up on the pig. But this poster also excuses the Russian new imperialism…
not that I think the hard left has any good solutions.
a flawed system? the system that destroyed and oppressed the tatar people, that liquidated millions, that oppressed, settlement colonized the central asians to disposses them and break their cultures (although I see from your comments you think this is good), destroying their culture, and also their environment for the greatest modern environmental disaster (the aral sea and the cotton slavery they imposed - and killing millions of them?
The best thing that has happened to the developing world is that the soviets collapsed. Nothing has been worse than the post colonial pursuit of the horrible soviet development model in reaction to the european colonialism.
spare us your models, in africa we have only started to recover from this.
It is correct.
Gorbachev only unmasked failure. He did not make failure. the states of the soviet empire did not flee because of propaganda, they fled because it was a system that did not function and could not function in a rational manner.
To blame Gorbachev is grotesque, like blaming the doctor that tells you that you have the lung cancer after smoking heavily for many decades.
Sorry, I didn’t think it was all that much proportional to the length of the work quoted from – which I thought was the standard.
A couple of these posters remind me of a statement one of my Professors said:
“A Communist is someone who reads Karl Marx over and over. An anti-communist is someone who read Karl Marx once and understood what he wrote”