Moscow: This winter – Christmas Day to be precise – marks the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, isn’t over it yet.
The 85-year-old Gorbachev suggested last week that the December 1991 decision to dissolve the union was the result of a “treachery” and that it was time for the United States and Russia to “cooperate.” He also said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “worthy president.”
In an interview with TASS, Gorbachev went further. “The Soviet Union cannot be restored,” he told the Russian news agency. “But a new Union can be established.”
Gorbachev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) helped end the Cold War, but they also took with it the Soviet Union, which proved unable to cope with the surge of anti-Communism and nationalism that was unleashed.
Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow’s diktat, spoke bitterly about the West’s failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of “perestroika” offered.
“They were rubbing their hands, saying, ‘How nice! We had been trying to do something about the Soviet Union for decades, and it ate itself up!’” Gorbachev said.
He blasted what he described as Western “triumphalism,” saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West.
Russia-West ties are at their worst since the Cold War era following Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March 2014 and its support for a pro-Russian separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and the European Union responded with several rounds of economic sanctions, which along with low oil prices have driven Russia’s economy into recession.
Gorbachev said Russian and U.S. leaders must sit down for talks and “stay at the table until they reach agreement.”
“The world needs Russia and the United States to cooperate,” Gorbachev said. “Together, they could lead the world ... to a new path.” Gorbachev also praised outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama. But he deplored what he described as a misguided policy toward Russia pursued by the U.S. and its allies both during his presidency and now.
“They have been badgering Russia with accusations and blaming it for everything,” Gorbachev said. “And now, there is a backlash to that in Russia. Russia wants to have friendly ties with America, but it’s difficult to do that when Russia sees that it’s being cheated.”
He also voiced hope that Russia and the United States would do better during Donald Trump’s presidency. “The relations between us are so important and concern everyone else, so we must take the interests of others into account,” said the leader credited with helping to end the Cold War. Gorbachev said he was surprised by Trump’s victory, but declined to offer an assessment of the president-elect. He said it remains to be seen what policies the new U.S. administration will pursue. “He has little political experience, but, maybe, it’s good,” he said.
Asked his opinion about Putin’s leadership, Gorbachev said he sees him as a “worthy president,” even though he has assailed the Kremlin for a crackdown on freedom of speech and rigid political controls.
“I almost fully supported him first, and then I began to voice criticism,” Gorbachev said of Putin. “I can’t renounce my views.”
Gorbachev has received global accolades for his “perestroika,” which eased government economic controls, and his role in ending the Cold War.
But at home, many held him responsible - and still do- for economic hardships, political turmoil and the loss of superpower status resulting from the Soviet Union’s collapse.
His voice trembled with emotion as he recalled the waning days of the Soviet Union, when his arch-foe, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and leaders of other Soviet republics were plotting his ouster while pretending to support a treaty that would give the republics broader powers.
“Yeltsin took part in that and supported it, but he was conspiring behind my back how to get rid of Gorbachev,” he said, saying that the Russian leader was driven by a hunger for power. “Russia was spearheading the Soviet breakup.”
The Soviet Union’s death spiral reached its crescendo in December 1991, when Ukraine held a referendum in which 90 percent of voters favored independence. Within just a few weeks, all Soviet republics had agreed that the Soviet Union would be dissolved. The official announcement came on Russian TV on December 21. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, and the Soviet flag was taken down at the Kremlin.
The man who oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union has had the last quarter-century to think about those events. Even now, he sounds bitter. “Behind our backs there was treachery, behind my back,” he said in his interview with the BBC. “They were burning down the whole house just to light a cigarette, just to get power. They couldn’t get it through democratic means. So they committed a crime. It was a coup”.
Gorbachev may well have a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union, but many in Russia feel the same. Putin himself has cited the collapse of the union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” and under his leadership Russia has embraced some formerly shunned aspects of Soviet history. One recent poll from the independent Levada Center found that 56 percent of Russians regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, while 28 percent did not.
Much like Putin, who has pushed for a new Eurasian Economic Union, Gorbachev hopes that some kind of union could return, though he emphasizes Moscow’s partners must come willingly. “In the former borders, with the same members, on the basis of free will, I think a new union is possible,” he told TASS.
But whoever is Russian leader, Gorbachev says the West and Russia need to come together. “If we don’t cooperate, if we don’t pull our efforts together and talk to each other, everyone will build up arms,” he said. “If there is a rifle on the wall in the first act of a play, it will go off in the end.”
“I’m sure that the Western press - and that includes you - has been given special instructions to discredit Putin and get rid of him,” he said in the interview with the BBC, adding that Putin’s popularity at home surged as he was criticized. “His popularity rating here has reached 86 percent. Soon, it will be 120 percent!”
Meeting secretly in a Belarus forest, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus on December 8, 1991 signed an agreement pronouncing the Soviet Union dead and setting up the Commonwealth of Independent States. The move caught both Gorbachev and the West by surprise. Two weeks later, other ex-Soviet nations joined the CIS.
Driven into a corner, Gorbachev stepped down on Christmas Day 1991. Hours later, Yeltsin and his lieutenants took over his office in the Kremlin.
Amid the meltdown, the loyalties of the 4 million-strong Soviet army and the massive KGB apparatus were split. Asked if he considered using force to keep the Soviet Union intact, Gorbachev said launching a violent domestic conflict in a nuclear superpower was never an option for him. “The country was loaded to the brim with weapons,” he said. “And it would immediately have pushed the country into a civil war.”
