The Irony of Gorbachev
He wasn’t a hero. But he still made the world a better place.
It’s weird to write about the impact Mikhail Gorbachev had on the world.
It’s weird because he led a repressive regime that really couldn’t be modernized. It’s weird because the nation he led was responsible for so much suffering around the world. It’s weird because he stood for values that were incredibly opposed to the values that I cherish.
There are a lot of people, especially cold war conservatives, who would easily dismiss the former Soviet leader who died on August 30 at the age of 91. He was the leader of the “evil empire.” Why should anyone care about someone like him?
And yet, it is surprising that I felt a tug at my throat when I wrote something on Facebook. It’s surprising that staunch anti-communists like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or former dissidents like Natan Sharansky had some respect for this man with the weird birthmark on his forehead. “if we look at the 20th century not through the lens of political struggles, but rather from the bird’s-eye perspective of history, we see how utterly unique Gorbachev was,” Sharansky wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post. “Gorbachev was a product of the Soviet regime, a member of its ruling elite who believed its ideology and enjoyed its privileges —…
