How Western apathy and arrogance betrayed Mikhail Gorbachev

I think I’ve heard enough about how the partnership between Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher changed the world for the better. It’s true that there has been a certain amount of revisionism in recent years. We know now that Russia did not become a democracy, or anything like one. We know that, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, a new range of problems was created that may never be resolved. We know that America as the resulting sole superpower, charged with preserving order in the world, had no idea what to do about Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya and only made things worse as it blundered on all fronts. 

But acknowledging the fact that nearly everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong doesn’t stop true believers from heaping praise on the Big Three. It is as if the dreadful state of the world today has nothing to do with what happened in the past but is due entirely to a series of unfortunate events that could never have been predicted.  

Of the three leaders from the 1980s, Gorbachev is probably the least culpable. He was changing the Soviet Union from the inside. He was an old-style Communist who woke up late in life to the realisation that his country and its empire was an unworkable construct that had to undergo radical reform. He understood that capitalism, rather like democracy in the political sphere, was the least worst form of running a modern economy. But he was never more than one step ahead of his old-school antagonists, who saw change as a betrayal. After a few helter-skelter years as president, he was removed from office to be kept, in effect, under house arrest. Photographs of him in 1989 with a saturnine Vladimir Putin looking over his shoulder were in retrospect a warning of the counter-reformation that would follow. 

But if Gorbachev played his unwitting part in creating the conditions for the omnishambles to come, it was the faux benevolence and sheer incompetence, combined with an almost wilful blindness to what needed to be done, of the Western powers that made the restoration of Russian tyranny virtually a done deal. All revolutions are betrayed in time and all revolutionaries, like all political careers, fail in the end. Gorbachev’s tragedy was that he was betrayed not by his enemies, but by his friends.   

Conversely, but with an extra helping of imperial arrogance, it was the assumption by successive US and British leaders that the West had a God-given right to do whatever it took to support and preserve their dominance in world affairs that gave us the horrors of Afghanistan, Libya and now, once again, Iraq. 

In both cases, it was the flagrant waste of genuine opportunities that most offends. In 1991, the East Bloc in Europe vanished overnight. Germany was reunited. But Russia, the central piece in the drama, was largely left to its own devices. In fairness to the Old Guard, it should be said that Thatcher was ousted from power in 1990 and Reagan’s presidency ended in January 1989, meaning we can’t say for sure what they would have done if still in office. All we do know is that their successors did nothing. Instead, Russia was left to fester. 

Within a couple of years, was a gangster republic, divvying up its vast fossil fuel and mineral wealth between so-called oligarchs, most of them criminals, who spent half their lives in London, Paris, Cyprus and Monte Carlo and the rest either in their luxury dachas or onboard their sumptuous private yachts. Moscow was turned into 1920s Chicago. The wealth that trickled down into a new middle class was based one part in crime and one part in the reckless exploitation of oil and gas. 

Not one Russian corporation of consequence unconnected to energy, raw materials, internal transport or the defence sector has emerged in more than 30 years of capitalist “freedom”. If you think I exaggerate, cast a glance at Wikipedia’s List of top 100 Russian companies.

Russian banking is founded on fraud and money-laundering. Corruption in business and finance is universal. Just about everyone who who could be described as rich derives their wealth, directly or indirectly, from criminality. 

At the top, of course, sits the arch-criminal, President Putin, with a personal fortune (unaudited) of as much as $200 billion. Putin is the worst of tyrants – not only ruthless, but sincere. He truly believes in the restoration of the Russian Empire, with himself as a combination of Stalin and Peter the Great. He doesn’t care how many have to die in pursuit of his dream. All that matters is that history should remember him down the centuries as the man who reunited his country to its eternal destiny. 

Had Reagan, the Bushes and Bill Clinton on the one hand and Thatcher, Major and Blair on the other bothered to draw up an inclusive, all-points plan for Russia, it might have been brought into the western fold. But they didn’t. Though they regretted the fall of Gorbachev and the interim, comic-opera years of Boris Yeltsin, they dismissed what was happening as no more than the teething troubles of a nascent democracy. While they should have engaged with the Russian economy at every level, seeking to instil respect for the rule of law and honest commerce, they let Russian practise dictate the terms. Germany, France and Italy moved some car production to Russia; America opened McDonald’s; Britain invited the oligarchs to set up their stalls in London. Untold millions of dollars were moved out of the country. 

It was what the West did on a geopolitical level that made a bad situation worse. They decided to expand Nato by admitting the nations of the former Warsaw Pact, plus the Baltic states, into the Alliance, thus ringing the Rodina, or mother country, with likely belligerents and, to add insult to injury, elected them as members of an expanded European Union. Suddenly, the only country that wasn’t a member of Europe’s burgeoning country clubs was Russia. 

Vladimir Putin wasn’t the only Russian to resent, and fear, what was happening. His fellow citizens felt the insult in their gut. The invasion of Ukraine was a criminal undertaking. That is not in doubt. But is it not the logical endgame of a process by which the West averted its gaze from what was happening on the domestic front while simultaneously rebranding the former Warsaw Pact as Nato’s Eastern flank? 

Bizarrely, the main – indeed the sole – object of the Western powers in 2022 is to build a wall of steel designed to contain Russia. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on rearming Nato so that Putin and his regime can be boxed in, like aliens, not just now but for decades into the future. And if a year from now that means extending our defensive wall to the Taiwan strait, with a view to constraining Russia’s ally, China, so be it.      

But post-Soviet Russia wasn’t the only possible big issue that the West has consistently misunderstood and misread. Back in 2001, ten years on from the collapse of the Soviet Union, islamist extremism was on the point of exploding, and here too America and Britain got it hopelessly wrong. No one blamed the US for invading Afghanistan after the events of 9/11. Tony Blair was almost more bullish than George Bush. Even the French were onboard. But then, having expelled Al Qaeda’s terrorist mafia and installed their preferred puppet ruler, we gave into the temptation of nation-building, leading to 20 years of bloody occupation ending in humiliation and a near rout at the hands of a resurgent Taliban. 

Two years later, it was Iraq’s turn, for no reason beyond faulty intelligence and a dislike of its admittedly savage ruler, Saddam Hussein. More years of occupation, with the British, but not this time the French, in tow, were followed by a graduated abandonment that left the country more divided than ever. Iraq, as I write, is a basket case, as is Libya, which the US, Britain and France helped liberate from the mad rule of Muammar Gaddafi only to look on helplessly as it fell into the hands of competing war lords bent on plunder. 

Can anyone blame the Chinese for thinking to themselves, time for a new sheriff in town, or the developing world for believing them? What good has America done in the world this century, and why are the British always there at their elbow, urging them on? 

The passing of Mikhail Gorbachev is a reminder to the world of the golden opportunity that was missed when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union capitulated to reality. We could have welcomed Russia in. Instead, we were happy to let chaos reign. It would be interesting, even instructive, we thought, to watch capitalism grow from the ground up. 

Elsewhere, America’s chaotic retreat from Kabul and the disastrous legacy of its interventions in Iraq and Libya have thrown into sharp relief the depth of ignorance that marks out the Western world view and its dyslectic reading of the runes. All we know – and we’re seeing it now in Ukraine – is how to blow things up.

Who do we think we are? What makes us think that we know best how the world should be run? If we were any good at it, I would understand. But we’re not. We’re useless. Maybe for the next twenty years, we would do better to concentrate on remaking the West as a safe, secure and prosperous home for its people while encouraging the international community at large to join us in making the Earth a better place.