The death of Mikhail Gorbachev – Corriere.it

Mikhail Gorbachevformer president of the Soviet Union, He passed away at the age of 91After a long illness. Gorbachev – who, as the last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, ended the Cold War with the United States, but could not avoid the collapse of the Soviet Union – was the last leader of the USSR, awarded the Otto Hahn Medal. For peace, and in 1990, the Nobel Peace Prize. According to reports from TASS, he will be buried at the Novodevichy cemetery, in Moscow, in a family cemetery, where he will be able to rest next to his wife Raissa. And about Putin’s war on Ukraine, he said, according to the director of “Echo of Moscow”, a few months ago: This invasion spoiled all his previous efforts towards Russia.

When his name came out of the Politburo meeting, he had to choose a successor Konstantin Chernenko, everyone was surprised. The highest rated candidate was Victor Grishin, 68, is an aging advocate who ruled the Soviet Union for some time. after, after Leonid Brezhnevwho died at the age of 76 in 1982, was 68 years old Jürg AndropovAnd then just two years later, seventy-three Chernenko who passed away on March 10, 1985.

Instead, this time the party leadership accepted the recommendation made by Andropov on his deathbed.

Choose a young man, choose Gorbachev because he is the only one who can restore the country’s momentumPut the Soviet Union back on its feet and give the party a breath.

And so the 54-year-old Mikhail Sergeevich, who had recently become a full member of the Supreme Administrative Body of the USSR, found himself in the Gensik chair on March 11, 1985, crowning a brilliant career, which began in his native Stavropol, in the vicinity of the Crimea.

There the young Mikhail, born in 1931, witnessed the thaw in Khrushchev’s time, which raised many hopes for more dynamic paintings. And there his fortune was born when he found himself, the party secretary of the district, M Accompany the strong KGB chief Andropov on vacationwho took him under his wing.

Already appearing, The fact that his wife Raisa appeared in publicwishing to travel around the country and meet people Revolution. We talked about it new meltWhile he made it clear that the country needed to speed up to try to regain the ground it had lost to the West.

The situation, as the KGB well knew, was catastrophic. The Brazef stagnation of the 1970s was followed by the resumption of the arms race. Ronald Reagan gave the final blow with his Star Wars show Which caused the army to panic and torpedoed all economic plans.

The Soviet Union was unable to produce consumer goods, military spending was insane, and the adventure in Afghanistan (to contain the advance of capitalism) was literally draining the country. Then speed up with productivity incentives Pay-to-work programAbandoning the principle of equality.

Then came Perestroika and Glasnost. Restructuring of the Soviet economic system by introducing very powerful market elements. In addition to transparency, the participation of the people with whom Gorbachev sought to conform.

walked hand in hand political transformation. Old Conservatives removed from key positions in government and party: Eduard Shevardnadze He replaced Andrei Gromyko, a survivor of the Stalin era, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Andrei Sakharov was returning to Moscow from internal exile. The Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held at which for the first time a kind of current was born, the Democratic Platform. Then the free electionsuntil the historic abolition in 1990 of Article 6 of the constitution that established the leadership role of the party.

Meanwhile, the Gensik (General Secretary) He faced a crazy arms race, trying to convince Americans that the image of him transmitted by television and popular newspapers was the real one. Margaret Thatcher was the first to believe in him
: We can do business together (we can work together). At the first summit in Geneva, Reagan You don’t make big holes. But then agreements to limit warheads and ICBMs arrived with Reagan and with him. Bush Sr.

The USSR could now devote its resources to improving the living standards of its citizens.
Perhaps, however, it was already too late.

The resistance of the bureaucrats, the factory managers, and the resistance of all the members of the association was very strong. Gorbachev did not have the courage to push to the end, and for this reason, It was abandoned by the most ardent reformists, such as Yeltsin and Shevardnadze.

The campaign against vodka helped undermine its initially very high popularity. Then came the program Five hundred days of Grigory Yavlinsky, Which should have led to the introduction of a market economy in the Soviet Union. Faced with the harsh attacks of the old chiefs, from Legachev to Ryzhkov, Gorbey, as they called him abroad, retreated from his position. He abandoned the young economist to adopt a more moderate program instead.

The monetary reform Resulting in Rush to stock up on paintings in stores. Hours in line to get sausage. Coated sugar, cigarettes, soap. Extremists were gathering around it Boris Yeltsin That after his removal from the top, he was revived with the victorious election to the presidency of the Russian Supreme Soviet. The empire began to collapse.

victory symbiosis In the 1989 Polish elections, Hungary opened the border, berlin wall collapse On November 9 of the same year, which Gorbachev had after considering his lack of opposition. Then the three Baltic republics stagnated. Gorbachev attempted to assemble the parts of the Soviet Union by resorting to the Treaty of the Union, among all other republics. But the situation was getting more difficult.

The minister, who in the meantime had become the head of the USSR, was uncertain, swinging between reformists and conservatives. The latter had the impression that he would have supported their initiative to fix things. On the eve of the signing of the agreement on August 19, 1991, they attempted a coup. On paper they were able to control the country: the prime minister, the interior minister, the head of the KGB. They did not take into account the fact that the citizens of the USSR had changed. And that Boris Yeltsin was not willing to give up.

When Corfu Bianco presented himself to address the crowd in front of the Supreme Soviet and rode one of the tanks sent by the coup leaders, the army did not respond. The coup failed (Interior Minister Pogo only committed suicide, and the others briefly ended up in prison.)

Power is now in the hands of the President of Russia, the most important republic of the Soviet Union.

Faced with a new attempt by Gorbachev to relaunch the Union Treaty, Yeltsin began to attack. Together with the leaders of the other two Slavic republics, Belarus and Ukraine, he decided to dissolve the Soviet Union on December 8. On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag was lowered from the highest flagpole in the Kremlin.

Gorbachev had to leave an armchair that no longer exists.

Post-Soviet dissolution is a different story. The beloved is abroad, the last of the Jinsk was hated at home. His attempt to return to the political scene in the 1996 elections was disastrous: he won less than 1% of the vote.

retired to the institution that bore his name, He received another major blow in 1999 with the death of his girlfriend Raisa.

with put it inGorbachev left a list that did not exist in Russia and also began to play the role of international representation. Then, faced with the autocratic transformation of Vladimir Vladimirovich, He has distanced himself from the Kremlin, repeatedly criticizing Putin’s choices. He even became one of the owners of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta (along with the oligarch Alexander Lebedev), in which Anna Politkovskaya worked.

In March 2021, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, the president’s spokesman told reporters that the Kremlin views Gorbachev as part of history with great respect. Of course there will be many who will mourn for him in the rest of the world and especially in Germany.