Mikhail Gorbachev: Ending the Cold War

Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the Soviet Union, in 1987.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/
biography/Mikhail-Gorbachev
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If you grew up in the ‘80s there was one threat that loomed. It hovered in the backs of all our minds, and created what we would now call anxiety.

It was the threat of nuclear war. The idea the entire world could be destroyed, the world rendered uninhabitable.

At the heart of the threat were the evil, cold-hearted Soviets. Stern, robotic Communists bent on imposing their totalitarian ideology on the entire world, starting with Eastern Europe and growing from there.

Then, one man put an end to the Cold War. He set off events that led to the fall of Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe like dominos.

His name was Mikhail Gorbachev.

He died in August and, sadly because of the actions of modern Russia, he was not given the hero’s send off he deserved.

It’s too bad, because Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War.

Growing up
My family comes from Germany, a country divided after the Second World War, into East and West Germany. East Germany was the heart of an Eastern Bloc outside Moscow and the Soviet Union, that also included Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. I was raised to be highly suspicious of Russia and Communists.

Two things my mom said always resonated with me. She said the Russian people were just like us, it was the government that could not be trusted. She also said that some day, someone would come along and change things. He would end Communism. We just had to wait.

Soviet leadership
My earliest memories of the Soviets were their leaders, symbolized by the stone-faced automaton Leonid Brezhnev. He never smiled, gave the impression he was uncompromising, and epitomized the Soviet state.

Then one day he was gone. He had died in November of 1982 and was replaced by Yuri Andropov. He did not last long, dying 15 months later in February of 1984. He was followed by Konstantin Chernenko. He too didn’t last long, dying 13 months after that in March of 1985.

I remember thinking, they needed to find someone who wasn’t already old when he got the job.

They found just such a person.

Reform-minded
The Soviet Union turned to 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev as their next leader. Although he was a Communist, he embarked on a serious campaign of reform, both internationally and domestically.

Domestically, his reforms had two prongs.

One was Glasnost, which meant openness, and allowed for more free speech and media, as well as opening up the country. An example was that a number of historians from the West were allowed access to old documents and artifacts from the earlier years of Soviet Russia. I had a professor, David Marples, who was one of those historians.

Gorbachev also created the Congress of People’s Deputies, whose members were elected by the people, undermining Communism and one-party rule even more.

The other was Perestroika, which was a restructuring of the economy. Central planning of the economy was downplayed, the profit motive was introduced in certain cases, and things began to thaw.

Internationally, he pulled troops out of the war with Afghanistan. He also met with United States President Ronald Reagan to discuss a number of issues, most notably nuclear disarmament. Unlike his predecessors, he did not send troops into support Communist governments in the Eastern Bloc when they were beginning to fall to pro-democratic forces. Those countries included Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania.

That essentially ended the Cold War.

Backlash
As the decade of the 1980s ended, things were looking up in Eastern Europe. Poland , Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania were on the road to democracy. East Germany had shed its Communist tyranny and was on the road to reunification with West Germany, and Russia was opening up,

Anytime there are winners in a reform movement, there are losers. I always feared things may be too good to be true in the Soviet Union. It was the summer of 1991 when I came home from work to discover a coup had taken place, Gorbachev had been arrested and the Soviet Union was back in the grip of the Communists.

However, the reforms had unleashed a power and energy that was not to be stopped. Boris Yeltsin, another reformer who would go onto be president of Russia, along with others launched protests and a counter-revolutionary movement that ended the coup.

Gorbachev was back, but the Soviet Union was not. It soon dissolved, first into a loose entity called the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, then just broke into several countries including Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

He would go on to be a critic of future presidents such as Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, but he would not hold office again.

For his efforts Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Parting thoughts
Growing up in the ‘80s, there was a level of angst and anxiety that always hovered in the background. The world was still at war, a Cold War, and we were all taught if that Cold War turned hot, we would all be in danger. It was the nuclear age, and a strike by nuclear missiles could wipe us all out. Everyone, the entire human population.

There were times I was so scared, I could not go to sleep. I discovered others felt that same way at various times.

Mikhail Gorbachev changed all that. He ended the Cold War. It is one of the greatest achievements of the 20th Century.

For that, I will be eternally grateful.