Putin, Gorbachev and two visions of Russian greatness
The Kremlin has returned to methods and goals based on conquest, fear and brutality
Gideon Rachman
© James FergusonDonald Trump promised to make America great again.
Xi Jinping’s favourite slogan touts the “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese people.
Vladimir Putin is driven by a similar desperate desire to restore Russian greatness.
But how do you define a great country?
Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week, had different ideas about that.
For Putin, national greatness is defined by territory, military might and the ability to terrify or subjugate your neighbours.
The Russian leader believes that it is his country’s right to be one of the world’s great powers.
Russia, he thinks, was “robbed” when Ukraine became independent and the key to rebuilding national power and grandeur is to reclaim lost territory.
The tragic decision to invade Ukraine was a culmination of this obsession.
For Gorbachev, national greatness was defined more by the dignity of ordinary citizens.
In a 2001 interview with the historian Daniel Yergin, he pointed to the Soviet Union’s inability to provide its citizens with everyday necessities: “Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defence system . . . [But] there’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life.
It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.”
The fact that ordinary Russians no longer have to put up with such privations owes much to Gorbachev’s economic reforms, hesitant though they were.
Those who blame him for ruining a working Soviet economy should remember that.
The former Soviet leader’s idea of human dignity extended to free speech.
It was also “incredible and humiliating” that, under the Soviet system, educated people had to live in a world of official lies, slogans and censorship.
Gorbachev changed that by freeing up the press and the creative industries, releasing dissidents and allowing proper historical research to resume.
Putin is returning Russia to Soviet-style repression — as he crushes the last independent media, imprisons the opposition and makes it a criminal offence to acknowledge that Russia is at war.
Crucially, Gorbachev’s idea of human dignity also extended beyond Russia’s borders.
The most important, principled decision that he ever made was not to send Soviet tanks into Poland, Hungary or East Germany in 1989 as democracy movements blossomed.
For a brief period, a Russian leader became an international symbol of political freedom.
When Gorbachev visited East Berlin in October 1989, a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crowds chanted “Gorby help us”.
When he visited Beijing in May, student protesters in Tiananmen Square hailed him as a hero — a leader who had shown that autocracies could reform and need not kill demonstrators in the streets.
That dream ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre a month later.
It is true that Gorbachev’s responses were not always noble and non-violent.
He is remembered bitterly in the Baltic states for briefly unleashing Soviet troops in 1991 in a failed bid to crush their moves towards independence.
But, as the Putinists would be the first to point out, Gorbachev lacked the ruthlessness to keep fighting and killing until Moscow’s sway was restored.
Putin is determined not to repeat that “mistake” and Ukraine has paid a terrible human cost as a result.
When the true story of what happened during the Russian siege of Mariupol emerges, it may reveal a war crime of historic proportions — with many thousands of civilians killed and buried in mass graves.
For Putin, massacres such as Mariupol are a mere detail when measured against his historic mission to restore Russian greatness.
His early expectations of victory over Ukraine within days have been dashed.
But he has shrugged this off by comparing himself with Peter the Great, whose Great Northern War lasted more than 20 years before victory was finally achieved.
It is a revealing comparison.
Peter the Great was a despot, distinguished by his absolute indifference to the loss of human life.
Many thousands died in the construction of his new capital, St Petersburg.
Peter also introduced compulsory military conscription to fuel his wars.
This is a step that Putin has so far been unwilling to take.
For all his tsarist pretensions, he probably understands the dangers of treating 21st-century citizens like 18th-century serfs.
Putin may believe that victories on the battlefield and territorial conquest are the only true ways of restoring national greatness.
But what the US Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” should also matter.
Warlike Russia does not do well on this score.
An international survey conducted last year by the University of Pennsylvania and others found that the three most admired countries in the world were Canada, Japan and Germany.
All three countries were rated highly on measures such as clean government, respect for human rights and social justice.
These are things that count for little in Putin’s Russia but that are taken seriously by people and governments that care about human dignity.
Putin signalled his contempt for these values — the values that Gorbachev promoted — by declaring himself too busy to attend his funeral.
The thousands of Russians who filed past Gorbachev’s open casket quietly signalled their disagreement.
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