EP56: Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union, and I’ve yet to cover any single person who has exerted a bigger effect on the world we live in today than him. When he died in August this year, the outpouring of grief for the 91-year-old in the West was immense; he was heralded as the man who ended the Cold War, and, through his signing of a 1987 nuclear treaty with Ronald Reagan, as the man who brought the world back from the brink of total destruction. 

However, Gorbachev’s legacy would lead you to the conclusion that the greater an impact a person leaves on the world, the less the world agrees on what exactly it is they left behind. Because for all the praise Gorbachev garnered in the West, those who lead Russia today see a very different legacy. Gorbachev wasn’t just the last leader of the Soviet Union; he was the last leader of an economic and military superpower. When the Soviet Union fell, Russia, the heart of that empire, lost 25% of its territory in three years. The 1990s was horrendous for ordinary Russians, with GDP per capita in the country more than halving across the decade. The degree to which this economic emasculation can be blamed on Gorbachev, who left power in 1991, is debateable, but there’s little doubting he lit the fuse under the disintegration of the Soviet Empire.

Fast forward thirty years to the present, and democracy in Russia is dead, and an orthodox Christian nationalist regime is waging the worst war in Europe since 1945. The doomsday clock, which indicates how close the world is to nuclear war, is now closer to midnight (i.e. total destruction) than at any time during the Cold War. Gorbachev’s legacy, in other words, is complicated, but you can’t overlook him if you want to understand the mess we’re in today. 

The person I’ve chosen to talk to about Gorbachev is someone who has spent his adult life looking at Russia and watching the slow-motion disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, John Lough worked as a NATO representative in Moscow, and worked as an international advisor to Russian oil company TNK-BP from 2003 until 2008. He is now an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and the Senior Vice President at global risk advisory firm Highgate. 

As well as Gorbachev’s career, we discuss the air of inevitability surrounding the Soviet Union’s collapse, the emergence of right-wing nationalism in Russia, and whether the so-called “unipolar moment”- the period after the Cold War, where the United States seemed completely untouchable- was really a good thing for its foreign policy. 

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