Mikhail Gorbachev will have been the good champion of two bad causes: "the survival of communism and the maintenance of the Soviet Union."
This lapidary formula from a Muscovite intellectual sums up the whole story... That of an exceptional reformer, whose weakness was to be "the last of the Soviets".
Passionately, viscerally.
This irreducible datum shaped Mikhail Gorbachev's vision of the world so deeply that it ended up bringing him down.
He who had always been able to anticipate the reactions of his political opponents in the party did not see the cyclone of national rebirths coming.
He persisted in reforming the Union in defiance of the nations.
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Mikhail Gorbachev: “We have made the only acceptable decision”
Some will speak of fault, even of political blindness.
But did Gorbachev have the means not to be blind?
Could Gorbachev disown Gorbachev?
"We cannot separate, comrades," he cried in December 1990 before a writers' congress.
It's written in our genes!
Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985. -/AFP
Did the man of perestroika ever say otherwise…
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