Was Mikhail Gorbachev a hero? That depends on who — and where — you ask.

Tom Nagorski

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The tributes pour in. “Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time” (the New York Times). Mikhail Gorbachev was “the man who ended the war … [and] changed the course of 20th-century history” (the Economist). “Hard to think of a single person who altered the course of history more in a positive direction than Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev”(a tweet from former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul).

While McFaul’s specific praise begs questions (what about Mahatma Gandhi? Nelson Mandela? Martin Luther King?), the plaudits are deserved. Mikhail Gorbachev altered the course of history.

But he was also a complicated figure — and his legacy equally so.

On the one hand, there is no question: The demise of the Soviet Union would never have happened in the peaceful way it did had a lesser statesman been at the helm. And that’s with more than the typical gratitude for a “peaceful transfer of power.” For decades, the notion that the USSR would collapse was considered naive; the idea that the endgame might play out as smoothly as a Christmas Day phone call from the Soviet leader to his counterpart in Washington would have been laughed at. But that’s what happened. Gorbachev picked up the phone on Christmas morning, 1991, two hours before his address to the world, and called President George H.W. Bush, notifying Bush of his decision and asking for his help in assuring that “the process of disintegration and destruction does not grow worse.”

The Cold War had ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Three decades before, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had marched to the precipice of nuclear confrontation over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Counterfactuals are hard, but a final chapter of the Cold War featuring someone other than Gorbachev (or, for that matter, leaders less capable than Bush and Secretary of State James Baker) might have ended in very different and nasty ways.

So — yes, for all these reasons, great credit and gratitude to Mikhail Gorbachev.

But those facts should not obscure others: that Gorbachev was not a courageous champion for democracy and freedom. He was a leader who initiated landmark reforms that went far further than he had imagined. Later, he saw the way the winds were blowing and tacked accordingly, often brilliantly. But along the way, he took actions that were more in the vein of the dictator than the liberal reformer.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s failings — real and exaggerated by Russian nationalist propaganda — were central to the rise of Vladimir Putin, who served Gorbachev’s Kremlin as an officer in the KGB. And today, Putin makes abundant use of the uncertainty that accompanied Gorbachev’s peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union as a central inspiration for his campaign of violence and terror in Ukraine.

Evolution — not revolution

Gorbachev’s initial reforms, under the monikers of glasnost (opening) and perestroika (restructuring), were huge political and economic icebreakers, as were the policies that followed: a nuclear arms agreement with the U.S., the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the freeing of political prisoners and the staging of the first multicandidate elections in Soviet history.

But in Gorbachev’s vision, these were starting points for an evolution, not a revolution. He didn’t want the Soviet Union to go away; his hopes were for a democratic socialism or a more humane form of communism. Unfortunately for him, such concepts would soon seem stale and not nearly sufficient for the moment.

By the summer of 1989, four years into his tenure, pro-democracy uprisings were in full bloom across the eastern European nations of the Soviet bloc. Gorbachev hadn’t wanted this, either — but he also didn’t want the calamity of a crackdown. In early October, one month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev went to Berlin to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Communist rule and embraced the East German autocrat Erich Honecker in Berlin (kissed him, actually, in an unfortunately iconic photo); at the same time, he urged Honecker to restrain his security forces and allow peaceful protests to continue.

Gorbachev was straddling the fence. Watching the winds.

Perhaps most important were the things he chose not to do. As the anti-Communist revolutions played out — beginning that summer and cresting with the November breakthrough at the Berlin Wall — Gorbachev held back. No troops were sent to quash the rebellions. One by one, the Soviet bloc dominoes fell, in different ways — Hungary and Poland that summer, Czechoslovakia and East Germany in the fall, and then the bloody end to the rule of the brutal dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed on Christmas Day in Bucharest. Within a year, all these countries that had been under the boot of Moscow would hold free elections. Gorbachev let it happen.

But when it came to democracy and independence for the republics of the Soviet Union, things unspooled too quickly for his liking. In the uneasy two-year period between the 1989 revolutions and the formal end of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev dispatched troops to quell unrest in other parts of his fading empire. Ask Lithuanians how they remember Gorbachev, and you will get a sense for the paradox: On the one hand, it was his statecraft that led to their independence movement; on the other, when Lithuanians voted overwhelmingly for that independence in early 1990, Gorbachev sent troops to put down what he saw as a rebellion. Fourteen people were killed.

Other heroes

When one considers the courageous trailblazers of the time — those who risked everything to bring freedom to the Soviet Union and its east bloc satellites, others rank far higher than Gorbachev: the Polish electrician and trade union leader Lech Walesa, the Czech playwright Václav Havel and the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, to name a few — all of whom were jailed on multiple occasions for their dissent. These men weren’t blowing with the wind; they were riding headlong into storms.

In Poland, there was another paradox: On the one hand, it was Gorbachev who finally acknowledged the well-documented Soviet massacre of some 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest during World War II — for Poles, the greatest of Joseph Stalin’s atrocities; but in Gorbachev’s first five years in power, he had kept alive the lie that the Germans had committed the crime. His glasnost wasn’t brave enough for the truth — at least not until he saw where things were heading.

Another, more consequential, example had come earlier, following the horror of the Chernobyl disaster. In the immediate aftermath of the meltdown, Gorbachev and his Politburo kept the truth from the world and from his own people — who in the Soviet period included Ukrainians living near the radiation zone. The traditional May Day parades were held across Ukraine — a full two weeks after the disaster. That secrecy almost certainly cost the lives of plant workers and residents of the area, and was in any case an unconscionable silence. On the other hand, it was also Gorbachev who ultimately exposed the disaster to public scrutiny; no predecessor of his would have done so.

Global hero, local villain

While other leaders have achieved great things on the global stage only to earn opprobrium at home (Walesa, another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a prime example), few have been punished as harshly at home as Gorbachev. The man who won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his statecraft and was for a time among the most revered and adored figures on the global stage soon became one of the most unpopular figures in his own country. When Gorbachev ran for the Russian presidency in 1996, he received less than 1 percent of the vote.

Well before Putin came to power and decried the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” a great many Russian citizens had arrived at the same conclusion. Gorbachev may have navigated a peaceful end to the Cold War and saved the world from calamity, but for millions of Russians, he was responsible for the disorder and penury that followed, along with a rapid descent in Russia’s status on the global stage.

I was a journalist in Moscow in this early post-Soviet time, a period marked by a collapse in the value of the Russian ruble, rampant inflation and a spike in violent crime — in a nation that had succeeded in little else but always managed to keep the public order. Life in the Soviet era had been miserable in many ways, but you could count on your next meal, on your streets and homes being clean and safe, and you could take pride in where your country stood in the global order of things.

By the time Gorbachev left power, almost every quality-of-life metric in Russia was proof of misery, and the nation’s prestige had been badly frayed. As a journalist, I visited the storied naval academy at St. Petersburg in 1992 and found cadets worried about making ends meet; at the headquarters of the Russian navy’s vaunted northern fleet, on the Arctic, a commander spoke openly of fears that his vessels would not receive funds needed to maintain the fleet. In Gorbachev’s wake, such stories, great and small, were repeated at almost every corner of Russian life.

Gorbachev’s fall, Putin’s rise

Any examination of how Putin won his popularity begins with the fact that he was seen to be cleaning up the mess that Gorbachev had left. That may sound harsh. But this was the reality for a Russian pensioner, soldier, local government official — or one of those Russian navy cadets or officers — this was the reality.

Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s immediate successor as head of the Russian Federation, was a deeply flawed leader but a man with a keen sense for politics and ordinary Russians — a quality Gorbachev had sorely lacked. Former President Richard Nixon once said of the two men, “Gorbachev is Wall Street; Yeltsin is Main Street. … Gorbachev can dazzle an audience; Yeltsin can move an audience.”

Gorbachev “thought to unite the impossible,” Yeltsin said in 1991. “Communism with the market, public property with private property, political pluralism with the Communist Party. These are incompatible couples, but he insisted on them and lay his fundamental strategic mistake.”

The legacy — and Ukraine

Gorbachev’s legacy — with all its complexities — means that he will be remembered very differently among different communities.

Those Russians who craved the freedoms won because of Gorbachev’s reforms will mourn him most.

“A part of me passed away today,” said Stanislav Kucher, a former Russian journalist and Grid special contributor who had interviewed Gorbachev on several occasions. “Like millions, I owe him my freedom. The fact that I, a boy from the Soviet provinces, got a chance to become a journalist, travel the world and live wherever I choose is thanks to him.”

The Putinists in Russia — an uncountable number, given the Kremlin’s stranglehold on media and reliable assessments of public opinion — will remember him with derision, even hatred.

Those involved in the frenetic diplomacy of the Soviet Union’s last days will credit Gorbachev for avoiding those worst-case scenarios. John McLaughlin had covered Eastern Europe for the CIA in the late 1980s and briefed Bush before his 1989 Malta summit with Gorbachev. “History will be kinder to Gorbachev than today’s Russian public, which recalls mainly the chaos of his final years,” McLaughlin told Grid. “In the arc of recent Russian history, Gorbachev did away with the Soviet Union, Yeltsin finished off communism, and Putin has taken Russia back to autocracy. Gorbachev moved Russia away from a troubled past, Putin is taking it back there.”

For many others — especially the Eastern Europeans and residents of the non-Russian former Soviet republics, the paradoxes linger.

The war in Ukraine is perhaps a fitting coda to the Gorbachev story, though Gorbachev never commented publicly on Putin’s invasion. He may have been too ill to do so. Two days after the war began, his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.”

Gorbachev’s mother was Ukrainian, and his father Russian — a not uncommon mix. Gorbachev’s impact on Ukraine’s recent history is — like so much else about his legacy — complex.

On the one hand, there is an independent Ukraine because the Soviet Union collapsed — again, a consequence of Gorbachev’s reforms rather than an outcome he sought. On the other, Ukrainians remember Gorbachev’s early years in power, in particular that fateful period when Gorbachev kept their people in the dark about the truth at Chernobyl.

The more recent history is murky as well. As the New York Times noted this week, Gorbachev had “supported Putin’s view of Ukraine as a ‘brotherly nation’ that should rightfully be in Russia’s orbit,” and he openly backed Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. He also toed the current Kremlin line that the West had made a dangerous mistake in “trying to draw Ukraine into NATO.” Meanwhile, Gorbachev criticized Putin for his crackdown on internal dissent and independent media.

It’s one more less-than-easily parsed piece of Gorbachev’s legacy.

Did Gorbachev alter the course of history? Certainly. Was he a visionary? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Was he a crusader for freedom and democracy? No. Did many people thrive as a result of his rule? Yes. Did many people suffer? Yes.

It’s complicated.