By the Great Terror of 1937, the tone for life in the Soviet Union was set. When Gorbachev died on Tuesday, a Stalinist in Russia seeking to regain ‘lost glory’ – for which he blames Gorbachev squarely – continued his invasion of an old Soviet republic.
Hindsight, a funny mirror, portrays Gorbachev as the man who ‘suddenly dismantled’ a global power and counterpole to a superpower. But, in 1985, when he took over from the 73-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, the country was already well on the low road to penury, not helped by a bleeding war in Afghanistan.
Chernenko’s predecessor, Yuri Andropov, as KGB chief in 1968, had shared classified data on the conditions of Soviet society with him. So, the 54-year-old already knew there was only one way for his country not to implode: by opening up (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika).
What followed was a free election in 1989 – not seen since the one after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks threw out – which accelerated the unfurling. Gorbachev had overestimated his ability to control a project that almost none in the leadership agreed with.
A little after Gorbachev visited India in 1986 and 1988, and after signing a landmark deal in 1987 with Ronald Reagan to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles, back home, asset-stripping was already on.
By Boxing Day 1991, the Soviet Union was gone. As was the Cold War. Gorbachev’s plan was an open, socialist society with ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries free of Stalinism in its various formats. In that, he failed. But not for lack of trying.