Editorial: Gorbachev’s integrity helped save the world — for a while

Today, the aging offices in the basement of Houston’s City Hall don’t seem all that historic but during the uncertain days of the Cold War, they were once the site of a fallout shelter, one of several around downtown, including at the old Foley’s and Houston First Baptist Church.

Much has changed since those tumultuous times, thanks in large part to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. He managed a peaceful end to the Cold War, declaring alongside American President Ronald Reagan that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” in 1985. The specter of nuclear violence has waned.

Students no longer practice hiding drills under their desks for fear of a foreign air raid — only, these days, for fear of a domestic mass shooting.

As the world remembers the legacy of Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, those of us who care about freedom, human rights and international stability should worry about its longevity.

On the public stage, the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev was at times adversarial. But their diplomatic partnership helped produce some of the biggest changes to global geopolitics, including the de-escalation of a nuclear arms race, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” was not so much an international confrontation when Reagan said it in his now famous 1987 speech in West Berlin. But rather it was a genuine effort at engagement, according to speechwriter Peter Robinson, who told NPR that his intent was to “ set up a space for the president’s subsequent negotiations.”

“Gorbachev was now talking about Glasnost and Perestroika,” Robinson continued, referencing the political and economic reforms toward transparency and limited free enterprise that Gorbachev began in 1985. “There had been no formal response, certainly no response by the president of the United States to these new initiatives. And so the speech set up a test. Is this real?”

Indeed it was. For a time.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has said he considers the end of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Many Russians agree with him. In the past few decades Gorbachev may have been welcomed and even celebrated in the West, where many American admirers took to calling him “Gorby,” but in his own homeland, he was largely written off as a weakling, an outcast, and a convenient scapegoat.

“In Russia, I am still accused of having ‘given away’ Eastern Europe,” Gorbachev wrote in 2020, according to Politico. “My response to this is: Who did I give it away to? Poland to the Poles, Hungary to the Hungarians, Czechoslovakia to the Czechs and Slovaks!”

Yes, and Putin might add: Ukraine to the Ukrainians.

Putin’s aggressive assault on Russia’s neighboring country shows that he would be happy to once again pull closed the Soviet Union’s heavy Iron Curtain. And it reveals how fragile the gains of the past truly are.

The Soviet Union imposed a devastating rule on its citizens, crushing any sign of protest or rebellion. In 1956, for example, when Hungarians rallied to demand more rights, the response was swift and brutal. Some 3,000 Hungarians were killed and many more fled.

But their revolutionary spirit could not be extinguished. Gorbachev had witnessed Nazi forces occupying his village as a young boy. He was committed to leading a more peaceful country. When Gorbachev began a series of reforms in 1985 meant to both bring some measure of openness and to revive an ailing economy, his intention was never to break up the Soviet Union. “Gorbachev believed he could reform the Communist Party and make a more open society, while keeping Soviet power intact,” according to NPR.

Still, it stirred resistance in the satellite nations.

When the unrest spread to Germany, Gorbachev did not respond with the usual violent repression but instead said that the “reunification of Germany was an internal German affair,” the BBC explained.

Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 but resigned in 1991. Later presidential pursuits garnered little support.

The democratic uprisings that helped hasten the Soviet Union’s fall have waxed and waned in Eastern Europe, where some leaders cozy up to right-wing fascists — to the great delight of right-wing Texans, it seems. Putin, meanwhile, views war with Ukraine as his chance to undo everything Gorbachev worked to secure. “We lost our confidence for only one moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world,” he said of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the day Russia launched the invasion. But, as the New York Times Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski argues, it’s not just boundary changes Putin rejects.

“All of Gorbachev’s reforms are now zero,” Aleksei A. Venediktov, a journalist and friend of Gorbachev said in an interview earlier this year. “This was his life’s work.”

As in our own country, leaders who demonstrate courage, integrity and humanity aren’t always rewarded, or even re-elected. It’s up to those of us who still value these principles — along with freedom and democracy — to show some gratitude for a man who didn’t just strive to keep his commitments to his own nation, but to the world.