Vladimir Putin salutes Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘huge’ historical role

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Vladimir Putin has saluted Mikhail Gorbachev’s “huge influence on the course of global history” in a message to the late Soviet premier’s family.

The Russian leader said Gorbachev, who has died at 91, “led our country through a period of difficult, dramatic change and substantial foreign policy, economic and social challenges”, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.

Putin had a complicated relationship with Gorbachev, praising him in public but lamenting the social and economic repercussions from the USSR’s break-up in 1991. Putin’s resentment over the collapse of the Soviet Union and Nato’s eastward expansion fuelled his decision to invade Ukraine in February.

But in the telegram to Gorbachev’s relatives, the Russian president said “he profoundly understood that reforms were essential and tried to solve the problems that had come to the fore”.

Putin also paid tribute to Gorbachev’s charity work after he left office and asked his relatives to “accept my sincere words of sympathy and support over your loss”.

Gorbachev is a complicated figure in Russia where many ordinary citizens resent the social and economic hardship that came along with his reforms and the humiliation of losing the Soviet Union’s superpower status.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said on Tuesday that Gorbachev was an “extraordinary, unique person” who “will be remembered all over the world” but said his faith that the end to the cold war would usher in improved relations between Moscow and the west was naive.

“This romanticism was misplaced. There was no romantic period and ‘honeymoon century’,” Peskov said. “Our opponents’ bloodthirstiness showed itself. It’s good that we realised and understood this in time.”

Russian state television also offered a mixed assessment of Gorbachev’s legacy. Olga Skabeyeva, host of a virulent current affairs talk show that runs for several hours daily, said the western praise pointed to the former leader’s mistakes.

“All our enemies are calling Gorbachev a reformer and a real man of the world who helped to unite Europe by destroying the Iron Curtain and putting an end to the arms race,” Skabeyeva said, next to a montage of western newspaper headlines.

But she pointed to Chinese state newspaper Global Times, saying it highlighted “the naivety and immaturity of Gorbachev, whose devotion to the west plunged the country into an era of political and economic instability”. She added: “That’s probably why Russian society’s, our country’s assessments of his legacy, are fundamentally, radically different.”

By contrast US president Joe Biden saluted a “man of remarkable vision” who allowed “a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people”.

Some western leaders seized on Gorbachev’s death to underline how Putin’s war in Ukraine and increasingly authoritarian rule had dismantled the late Soviet leader’s legacy by rolling back the hard-won freedoms he introduced.

French president Emmanuel Macron praised Gorbachev’s “commitment to peace in Europe.” Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, said the former Soviet leader had died “at a time when not only democracy in Russia has failed [ . . .] But also when Russia and the Russian president Putin have dug new trenches in Europe [and] begun a terrible war against a neighbouring state, Ukraine”.

But Gorbachev is remembered less fondly in states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, particularly Lithuania, where a court began hearing a lawsuit against him this year charging him with war crimes over the violent suppression of pro-independence protests in 1991.

“Lithuanians will not glorify Gorbachev. We will never forget [that] his army murdered civilians to prolong his regime’s occupation of our country,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister, tweeted. “His soldiers fired on our unarmed protesters and crushed them under his tanks. That is how we will remember him.”

Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader jailed last year on charges he says are retribution for challenging Putin, wrote from prison that Gorbachev deserved praise for avoiding the temptations of corruption and clinging to power.

“Gorbachev was one of the very few who didn’t use power and its possibilities to personally enrich and benefit himself. He left office peacefully and willingly in respect of voters’ wishes. That alone is a huge triumph by the standards of the former USSR,” Navalny wrote.