Norris McDonald | Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘Humpty-Dumpty Soviet Russia’: The end of an era

There have been over 100 military interventions by America and her North Atlantic Treaty allies since President Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 promising to give the Soviet Russian people a new, prosperous life and greater political freedom than they had experienced under communism.

It was under his leadership that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1993 and broke up into many independent states; leaving a ruined political system; increased poverty, and a world that, in my opinion, was more chaotic than he had inherited from his successors.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV VISION

Gorbachev emerged on the global political stage at the time when a Cold War was raging between Soviet Russia and her Warsaw Pact, Eastern European allies, on one hand; and on the other hand, America, and her North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) allies.

Germany before this had waged two world wars. The last one, World War II, ended in 1945, with Nazi Germany in ruins and with the country divided between a communist East Germany and capitalist West Germany.

The fall of the divisive ‘Iron Curtain’, symbolic as it seemed, was to have ushered in a new era of peace, friendship and international cooperation.

I do not think this fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ – that divided Europe and the unification of Germany – gave Mikhail Gorbachev and Russia the political benefits they expected.

What we have seen instead, in my opinion, is an invigorated Germany, as a NATO member, which is now a thorn in Russia’s side. And a perpetual expansion of NATO that has become an even greater existentialist threat to Russia.

Perestroika, one of Gorbachev’s visions, was to reform what was perceived as a stagnant communist system that had not improved the quality of life of the people of the Soviet Union. America and the West, ostensibly, promised that they would help him do that.

Quite astonishingly, did he really think that they would have helped him?

Glasnost was his other main ingredient of his wishful political plan, intended to create more political freedom, along Western-style liberalism.

GORBACHEV’S MISTAKES

Gorbachev’s political doctrine, or perestroika and glasnost, certainly did not achieve the goals and made Russia and the world any safer. In fact, Russia, in my opinion, was left humiliated and impotent, chock-filled with nuclear weapons, but being an economic destitute state.

The national wealth of the Russian people was plundered by new, corrupt ruling class and big American and Western capitalist.

And the world was now faced with a more militant, American NATO-led imperialism, that sought to bully, conquer, and plunder the wealth of developing nations.

Poor Mikhail Gorbachev!

Maybe Mr Gorbachev had not heard of “Operation Unthinkable” in which America and Great Britain were planning to use surrendered German troops, in 1945, to help them attack the soviet Red Army that had just saved their cowardly skins.

“Operation Unthinkable,” as its name says, is well ranked in the ignoble pantheon of shame and disdain.

The arms treaty he negotiated with Ronald Reagan has been scrapped by America in the mad drive for military, political and economic hegemony.

‘THE HUMPTY DUMPTY SOVIET RUSSIA’

Maybe one of the last atonements of Boris Yeltsin, former Russia leader, was his appointment of Vladimir Putin as president when he resigned in 1999.

Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were loved in the Western imperialist world, but on the face of the prevailing evidence and, in my opinion, were reviled in the former Humpty Dumpty Soviet Russia they helped to destroy.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘Humpty Dumpty Soviet Union’ has fallen and given rise to “three decades of militarization of American foreign policy,” Professor Jeffery Sachs says, with “more than one hundred military interventions by the United States since 1991”.

Jeffery Sachs was an American economic adviser to both President Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin.

He was also one of the earlier supporters and intellectual defenders of the so-called Gorbachevian political reform process in Russia.

Dr Sachs is now one of the biggest critics of America’s and Europe’s imperialist expansionism and gross betrayal of Mr Gorbachev and Russia.

His current views were made known on the radio programme, ‘Democracy Now’, August 30, 2022 – a transcript of which is available online.

My dear friends, Professor Jeffery Sachs is right.

The world is not a safer place under the hegemonic, imperialist world.

Peace, security, justice, a healthy life free of hunger and pauperism are ideal conceptions. It was those ideals that gave rise to the Soviet Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Russian Revolution inspired the anticolonial struggle worldwide. Many of the great African political leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean got a moral reawakening based on the Russian people’s political struggle.

Not only that, Soviet Russia and later China and Cuba came to the military, political and economic assistance to poor people world over who were fighting for true democracy, freedom, and justice.

I think we all have a moral responsibility to fight for true peace and security and the right to develop our natural resources and human skills.

And this is the point missed by irrational proponents of the imperialist world view. They want us all to bow down and subjugate ourselves to greedy, brutal exploitation.

Mikhail Gorbachev may have helped ‘tear down the Berlin Wall’, but both directly and indirectly, he may have, in my opinion, contributed to the rise of the hegemonic ‘One Order Don’, imperialist world.

It is this grave injustice Jamaican poet Claude McKay cautioned against, that we ought not to die ignoble, ‘hunted, herded, penned and like hogs’.

Gorbachev recognising his own mistakes – at the end of his life – and became incredibly supportive of President Vladimir Putin’s plan to rebuild Russia as a mighty world power.

Nevertheless, Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30, 2022, leaving behind a world much more violent and chaotic than the one he inherited.

OUR MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

I think we all have a moral responsibility to fight for true peace and security and the right to develop our natural resources and human skills.

That is just the ‘bitta’ truth!

- Norris McDonald is an economic journalist, political analyst, and respiratory therapist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com.