Anne Applebaum does a convincing job in demolishing what remains of the reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev who led the USSR to its own collapse:

… the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev’s fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the dismantling of the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself, one of the founding statesmen of modern Russia — and yet his birthday gala was held in the Royal Albert Hall, in London, among people who hardly knew him…

… all of Gorbachev’s most significant and most radical decisions were the ones he did not make. He did not order the East Germans to shoot at people crossing the Berlin Wall. He did not launch a war to prevent the defection of the Baltic states. He did not stop the breakup of the Soviet Union or prevent Yeltsin’s rise to power.

The end of communism certainly could have been far bloodier, and if someone else had been in charge it might have been. For his refusal to use violence, Gorbachev deserves Anka’s corny serenade.

But because he did not understand what was happening, Gorbachev also did not prepare his compatriots for major political and economic change. He did not help design democratic institutions, and he did not lay the foundations for an orderly economic reform.

Instead, he tried to hold on to power until the very last moment — to preserve the Soviet Union until it was too late. As a result, he did not politically survive its collapse.

Good grief, this fine piece takes us back to what now seems like another parallel universe.

Remember when Mrs Thatcher organised a visit to London for Gorbachev? The programme included a visit to a well-stocked (ie normal) supermarket in the unfashionable Vauxhall, area of London across the Thames, to help persuade Gorby that capitalism really did manage to deliver goods to the masses, not just a privileged elite.

I also recall the visit to London (in 1991?) of Grigory Yavlinsky who at that point was touring the world with Graham Allison from Harvard to try to drum up international support for their supposedly bold plan to transform the USSR to a market economy. We all raced to Chatham House, wanting to be impressed and indeed with HMG ready to look seriously at options for pumping large resources in to support a good plan.

But it was all a flop. The pitch amounted to a detail-free appeal: "Give us lots of money – and trust us to use it wisely!". Everyone shuffled away unimpressed and somewhat embarrassed.

The Soviet Union then sighed and keeled over. Gorbachev resigned on our Christmas Day, 25 December 1991. By then no-one noticed or even cared – Boris Yeltsin had taken full charge in Moscow. 

Thus it is as Anne Applebaum so deftly decribes. Gorbachev lingers on, still enjoying a warm glow of sorts in the West for ending the USSR ‘nicely’, but a figure of derision in his own country:

Gorbachev knew nothing of real democracy, and even less of free market economics. Brought up and educated in Soviet culture, he was simply unable to think his way out of that system. He didn’t prevent change, and he didn’t shoot the people who finally made change happen. But at such a historic moment, ignorance is no excuse.

Gorby’s basic problem was, of course, that he was at heart a decent man but also a stolid and inflexible communist who believed in witchcraft:

Gordievsky said that Gorbachev utterly misunderstood the problems. He really believed that the Soviet economy was like a car whose only problem was a badly running engine: if it stopped running on vodka and tried running on petrol, the Engine of Socialism would whir into action and propel it off into a bright future.

"In other words," I said, "Gorbachev believes in witchcraft?"

"Exactly – he believes in witchcraft!"

And that is not a sound basis for running a lemonade stall, let alone for reforming an ailing superpower sprawled across eleven timezones.