A Great Friend to Mankind Is Gone
Mikhail Gorbachev came closer than anyone else so far to saving us
Back when I was a journalist living in Russia, I hopped on a plane with Mikhail Gorbachev.
He’d been out of power for six years — six years of watching his rival Boris Yeltsin lurch around drunkenly — and he wanted back in the Kremlin. Elections were approaching, so Gorbachev signed up.
It was a terrible idea. He had no party behind him, the Russian media trashed or ignored his candidacy, and he came in 6th place (with 0.5% of the vote).
On the bright side, the disdain of leading newspapers like Izvestia and Kommersant left Gorbachev’s staff open to attention from second-tier media like The Moscow Times, where I was a reporter. They told me I could interview him on the short flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where he was headed for a campaign event.
My wife Svetlana and I had lived for years in St. Petersburg and had family there, so of course Svetlana — and baby Casey, then about six months old — hopped the flight as well. So did Gorbachev’s wife Raisa.
Then, as often happens in journalism, word came back from the seats up front: Gorbachev wanted to rest. No interview. Maybe later.
In response, Svetlana scooped up Casey and marched up to the Gorbachevs.
“Mikhail Sergeyevich!” she said in an accusatory tone: “You are responsible for this baby!”
The Gorbachevs stared at her bug-eyed. I thought Mikhail Gorbachev looked like he was trying to remember whether he knew this young woman, and I probably looked just as panicked. Then Svetlana had her laugh and explained: Because of glasnost, perestroika, etc., which led to an American husband, etc.
Everyone was delighted, and Raisa asked to hold Casey. A photographer for the Itar-Tass news agency took pictures of Raisa & Casey, and they ran on Russian news agencies and were published in small-town Russian newspapers over the next few days. Casey kept playing with a gold-leafed broach on Raisa’s sweater, and Mikhail Gorbachev kept jokingly admonishing her not to touch it. He said something about how it was very expensive, so Casey should get her father (me) to buy one for her mother, and then Casey could play with that one instead.
Looking back on this moment from the perspective of 2022, it’s interesting that all three of the adults — Raisa, Mikhail and Svetlana — were Russian citizens of Ukrainian heritage. My wife was born to Ukrainian parents and raised through childhood in Ukraine, then moved to St. Petersburg as a pre-teen. Raisa’s father was a Ukrainian railway worker. Mikhail’s family were mixed Ukrainian-Russian peasant stock. It’s hardly a surprise to hear that Gorbachev died “shocked and bewildered” by the war in Ukraine.
The formal interview with Gorbachev never happened. After such a pleasant human interaction, all cooing over our baby, we just parted with smiles and returned to our seats. I did so with something much more valuable then answers to some campaign questions: An intuitive sense that, as I’d suspected, he was a good man.
Gorbachev plowed ahead with his Quixotic campaign, during which he was heckled, ridiculed, slapped, and spat upon. Raisa died just three years later — felled at age 67 by a rare, rapidly progressive leukemia that killed her within just several weeks of diagnosis. She was clearly the love of Gorbachev’s life, and he had to soldier on without her for two more decades, until he also died last week at age 91. (I and my daughter Casey — now a beautiful 27-year-old New Yorker — were on a long backpacking trip together, and only learned of his death when we returned to civilization some days ago).
In U.S. obituaries, our national eulogy for Gorbachev could be summed up as: “Nice guy — definitely no Vladimir Putin! — who brought necessary change, but made mistakes, and unleashed forces he couldn’t control.”
This bland summary does him no justice. It ignores all of the times when he was breathtakingly radical.
Consider his January 1986 letter to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in which Gorbachev proposed total destruction not just of all nuclear weapons, but of any and all new weapons that might be similarly destructive. Under Gorbachev’s proposed plan: “By the end of 1999 no more nuclear weapons remain on Earth.” He was following in the footsteps of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other giants who have called on mankind to renounce war. Or, as U.S. President John F. Kennedy had put it just 25 years earlier in a speech to the United Nations: “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”
Ten months after that letter, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Iceland for the famed Reykjavik summit and came within a whisper of realizing his vision. They were supported by U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz (another informed national security leader eager for global nuclear disarmament), but also sullenly opposed by security forces in both nations.
It’s one of the great tragedies of my lifetime that the world-changing potential of this moment was not realized. But Gorbachev soldiered on. Consider his final book, subtitled “My Appeal for Peace and Freedom,” and read by basically no one.
“World politics is moving in an extremely dangerous direction,” Gorbachev warned us two years ago, decrying “the gradual remilitarization of thought and action, a continual increase in military spending, and the dismantling of the arms control system.”
He laid much of the blame for this squarely onto the United States; criticized the drive to expand NATO as “a major strategic blunder on the part of the West and a move that tended to destabilize the political and military situation in Europe and beyond”; worried we are sleepwalking toward another world war; and disdainfully quoted boasting by then-President Donald Trump about how the United States has “more money than anybody else by far” and so could spend it on weapons until the rest of the world was cowed — “we’ll build it up until they come to their senses,” said Trump. Gorbachev was incredulous at this: “Build up the [U.S. nuclear] arsenal — why, to what end? To impose the country’s will on the world?”
Yet even as he criticized the military empire machines headquartered in Washington and Moscow, there was no greater friend to the American people than Gorbachev. Perhaps my favorite of all the commentaries responding to his death was that of the National Security Archive, a non-profit research center that pries free, collects, analyzes and disseminates government documents.
The archive staff state frankly that they couldn’t have done their work without Gorbachev and glasnost, and they salute him for providing thousands of pages of primary documents to historians (far more readily than U.S. counterparts), and repeatedly over the years meeting with them to answer questions and to contribute recollections and analysis. Again: Gorbachev did not have to do any of that, and he made no money for it. He did this to encourage friendship and understanding between Russia and America.
Mr. Gorbachev deserves the credit [the archives staff write] for the revolutionary changes in the 1980s that transformed the Soviet Union, brought down the Iron Curtain, reunited Germany, enabled Eastern Europeans to reclaim their countries, abolished an entire class of nuclear weapons, ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan, settled regional conflicts, and put forward a model of international politics that denounced violence as any real solution to political problems.
He lived to see his visions of a “common European home” and a demilitarized social democratic Soviet Union demolished by opponents. Power-seeking party apparatchiks and nationalists … dissolved the USSR in 1991, chasing Gorbachev from the Kremlin; and their successors in Moscow continue to destroy Russia today. Western triumphalists in the 1990s took all credit for Gorbachev’s courageous actions, and learned nothing from his “new thinking” but how it cost him power.
He will be missed.