🌏 Regardless of the tone of the assessments, the deeds and words of Gorbachev are known to everyone, for the older generations — according to their personal memory, for the current generation of students — on questions from Russia’s Unified State Examination.
And therefore, it is tempting for a historian not to write another text about Gorbachev, of which there have already been so many these days, but to speculate about the forks in history: what would have happened “with the Motherland and with us” if Gorbachev had never existed. We partly referred to these alternatives earlier, in the Valdai Paper “What If… the Soviet Union Had Not Collapsed?”
Whether it is possible to reconcile the “black” and “white” assessments of Gorbachev, only history will show, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.
#Norms_and_Values #Gorbachev
@valdai_club
And therefore, it is tempting for a historian not to write another text about Gorbachev, of which there have already been so many these days, but to speculate about the forks in history: what would have happened “with the Motherland and with us” if Gorbachev had never existed. We partly referred to these alternatives earlier, in the Valdai Paper “What If… the Soviet Union Had Not Collapsed?”
Whether it is possible to reconcile the “black” and “white” assessments of Gorbachev, only history will show, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.
#Norms_and_Values #Gorbachev
@valdai_club
Valdai Club
If There Had Been No Gorbachev
Was the USSR doomed to collapse under Gorbachev? Could anyone stop him? Alas, the “staff culture” of the Central Committee was such that “collective leadership” was a fiction. The principle “the boss is always right” dominated, writes Valdai Club Programme…
🌐 Gorbachev forever remained the image of perestroika and glasnost.
For some in Russia, Gorbachev was the one who betrayed the interests of the Soviet Union, weakening its power and setting the stage for the humanitarian catastrophe that struck the millions of Russians left after 1991 to live in former Soviet republics subject to new national sentiments at the local level.
For others, he was a man who prevented even worse things from happening and knew how to overcome the rigid limitations of an ideology, writes Valdai Club expert Stefano Pilotto.
#Norms_and_Values #Gorbachev
@valdai_club
For some in Russia, Gorbachev was the one who betrayed the interests of the Soviet Union, weakening its power and setting the stage for the humanitarian catastrophe that struck the millions of Russians left after 1991 to live in former Soviet republics subject to new national sentiments at the local level.
For others, he was a man who prevented even worse things from happening and knew how to overcome the rigid limitations of an ideology, writes Valdai Club expert Stefano Pilotto.
#Norms_and_Values #Gorbachev
@valdai_club