40 years since Gorbachev came to power: A massive, missed opportunity. Shame on us.

On this day in history, 11 March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader. Kids, I tell you, the optimism! But we failed bitterly. And Ukraine is paying the price. Now Europe must step up.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

40 years ago today, people like me who knew Russian and studied international politics and the Soviet Union were very very excited.

From the late 1970s till 1985, we had spent our energy on pretty useless ‘Kremlinology’; trying to predict the policies of the constantly changing Soviet leadership - the old men kept dying on us, in very quick succession - based on random facts such as their clothes, haircuts, placement in public photos, sudden absence from said photos, what was their relationship to the KGB, rumors about their family background, whether they were still healthy enough to lift their arm saluting the Soviet soldiers at the endless military parades, knowledge of the English language or not, had they ever travelled outside the USSR?

In the end, our focus was always on possibly answering the two same questions: Basically, how much did the new Soviet leader hate the West or not, enough to nuclear bomb us? And, domestically, would the new leader allow any kind of free debate or thinking?

On ‘our’ side, things were always pretty easy to read: whether the president was called Reagan or Bush or Clinton, or the European leaders were Thatcher, Mitterand or Kohl (look them up), they shared by and large the same goals and motives – security and cohesion in the West, democracy and freedoms for the East.

And they all kept repeating the same thing: We want freedom for the people of the ‘prison of nationalities’ or ‘the evil empire’ (= USSR). Best expressed by President Reagan’s 1987 speech in Berlin – “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Then – to our massive shock and surprise - he did. Gorbachev tore down the wall.

Or, rather, he did not stop it when it happened. When I asked him directly about this in the early 1990s, Gorbachev admitted to me that “no, it is true, I personally did not open the Berlin Wall, I must admit. But I also did not try to brick it up when people punched holes in it. If it had not been in Berlin, the walls of Europe would have come down elsewhere. And we were happy about it.”

And what did we, the West, do? Not much. Well, not much good anyway. Not much that would stand the passage of time, or even just a few decades. In his 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall, Reagan said:

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

But today, 42 years later, most of the people of the former Soviet Union still do not live in freedom or in prosperity. Gorbachev opened the wall, but we did not fulfill our ‘promises.’

Sure, we did expand the EU and NATO – but only with the countries of East and Central Europe (and the Baltics). But – as the former deputy foreign minister Andrei Sannikov wrote in a piece here on this blog last week (a must-read); by stopping at the borders of the former Soviet Union, the West in fact ‘delivered’ countries like Belarus, Ukraine and the Caucasus to the Kremlin, for free - ‘take them, there will be no consequences.’

During the 1990s, the West and most of all the U.S. focused on our relationship with Soviet and Russian leaders - individuals - instead of building lasting structures, organizations. This is a political disease that has cost many countries and the U.S. taxpayer dearly over the years - remember how much Washington loved Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai? Handsome and English (American) speaking, until it turned out that he, despite those ‘qualities,’ was as corrupt as other Afghan leaders.

In the U.S. (and not only, of course,) politics has to be ‘personal’, it has to be black and white, it has to be love or hate. Today we watch Trump and Vance personally hating on Zelensky - in the 1990s, we had the opposite, a love fest between a drunk Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U.S. President Bill Clinton, literally trying to keep Yeltsin from falling over at events. The Clinton administration ran Yeltsin’s re-election campaign for him - successfully. Because the U.S. could not allow Yeltsin’s communist opponent to win, and because Clinton thought that the hapless Yeltsin would be able to drag Russia westwards.

But Yeltsin drank himself out of office. And the last thing he did before leaving was handing over the country to one Vladimir Putin. In exchange for Putin’s promise not to go after the corrupt Yeltsin family and wider clan. That was probably the last promise that Putin has ever kept.

During the 1990s, we had expanded NATO, no doubt for all sorts of correct military-strategic reasons, but also in the process handing Putin - on a silver platter - a great, although ‘fake’, argument about ‘the West once again encroaching on Russia, like Hitler, like Napoleon’. It doesn’t matter that Putin knows better, what matters is that he could and can use this imagery and manipulate the ‘average' Russian’ with it.

We never really helped the countries in the former Soviet Union much financially - or at least not efficiently - beyond imposing extreme financial experiments and so-called ‘liberalization’ on them. Which we told them was a part of democratization.

This had two results; first that oligarchs snapped up gigantic state enterprises and banks for pennies (sometimes literally for a dollar or two - for industries in reality worth billions). Secondly - ‘deRmocracy’. ‘Dermocracy’ (‘дермократия’) is Russian slang for crap-democracy - from the Russian word ‘dermo’ meaning - well, crap. For the ‘average Russian’, signifying that the West imposed a system on us that has made the rich crooks richer and the rest of us poorer, while western leaders pretend that we would have a voice. Which, of course, we never did get. And this took place not just in Russia. Let’s remember that, please: Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asia also had ‘dermocracy’ imposed on them.

The only real success story is the Baltics, and partially Ukraine ( from 2014) and previously Georgia (now rapidly sliding back into autocracy).

And then the 2000s arrived - with two almost parallel momentous events: the 9-11 attack and Vladimir Putin taking over in Russia. And, again, at the time Putin took over, pretty much all the rulers of former Soviet republics were (officially former) Communists who had been in power since Soviet times - and would remain so for another 15-20 years. Hell, some of them are even in power to this day.

After 9-11, the U.S. and thus the West lost interest in the former USSR, as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld persuaded us all that hunting down Bin Laden and all the little Bin Ladens around the world was the only thing that counted. We sort of lost interest in the former Soviet Union.

Whatever people will tell you young folks today - we did have a chance back then, 30 or 40 years ago, for democracy and international security in Europe. But naive, incoherent Western policies made sure that ‘the usual crooks’ stayed in power in the East. Vladimir Putin is simply one of them, the über crook.

While we in the West were busy talking about ‘The end of history’, Putin returned to history; preying on the Russians’ fear of the West, the need for a ‘strong hand’, publicly grieving over the fall of the Soviet Union. And eventually using that perverted version of history as his argument for invading first Georgia in 2008, then Crimea and Donbas in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022.

‘Oh come on, Michael,” you protest, ‘have we really done that badly?’

Well, yes, we have - the proof of our failure is in the pudding; when I as a young, enthusiastic student of Russian, went to Moscow 40 years ago to have a closer look at ‘that Gorba guy’, my professors at home warned me not to be naïve, not to be expect too quick a transformation to democracy. I remember how they all constantly kept repeating one specific sentence: ‘Be patient, it will take a generation to change.’ Well folks, we have now waited for almost two generations and the majority of the former Soviet republics are – when it comes to democracy, rule of law, social justice – in an even worse state than 40 years ago.

Today we don’t need much ‘Kremlinology’ to guess the motives and plans of the little KGBist who has by now been in power for 26 years. Putin’s policies are typical-typical K-G-B: steal, ruin, rape. There is no overall strategy, no wider goals, no imagination - a true KGBist only ruins, breaks down, bombs, tortures. In Ukraine, Putin doesn’t have a plan - apart from preventing that the Ukrainians themselves get to choose the life they want, namely to belong to Europe.

I recently heard the brilliant U.S. historian Stephen Kotkin - a biographer of Stalin - sum up Vladimir Putin: “as nasty as nasty comes”. That’s the perfect description.

But that doesn’t mean that ‘Kremlinology’ is dead. No, it has simply gone to Washington.

For the last month and a half we (by now) old ‘Kremlinologists’ have been spending our energy watching Donald Trump rule the Oval Office; a misogynist, raping, lying, megalomaniac that makes Reagan and Dan Quayle seem coherent, George W Bush well-informed, and Dick Cheney pleasant company. To boot, Trump has surrounded himself with characters similar to himself in Vice President Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, not to mention Elon Musk. And many more of that ilk.

Almost all of them expressing a particular disdain for Ukraine. I try to stay away from amateur psychology, but it is only too evident that many in the Trump administration are deeply-deeply damaged human beings with massive inferiority complexes, starting with the president himself. We also know all about Trump’s admiration for Putin the dictator. It’s textbook stuff.

I met Mikheil Gorbachev on many occasions, as a student and later working in Moscow. Like Donald Trump he was a figure-head for a big, heavy government apparatus. But remarkably un-like Donald Trump, Gorbachev - who certainly had a big ego but also real self-confidence - surrounded himself with intelligent people like Eduard Shevardnadze and Aleksandr Yakovlev and many more. They were the real brains behind Gorbachev’s ‘Perestroika’, ‘Glasnost’ and ‘New Political Thinking’ – the radical policy changes on the Soviet side that would change the world for all of us.

Where Gorbachev and his people had the strength and self-belief to open up and seek compromise, people like Putin and Trump do not understand coorporation and compromise.

In 2025, ‘Kremlinology’ has become ‘Trumpology’. Like in 1985, we have two basic questions: How crazy will he go? How long can this go on for?

In November 2024, the Americans decided to return Trump to the Oval Office. It sounds bombastic, I know, but future historians (maybe even future generations) will condemn this decision very harshly. The Trump voters of November 2024 will go down in history as the dumbest and most irresponsible group of people ever in a modern democracy; people who were too lazy, too greedy or too gullible to care about their neighbors, society, or the rest of the world. And not capable of understanding that this may ‘hit’ the rest of the world first - but sooner or later it will land at their own door step.

Europe needs to understand that the U.S. ‘is gone.’ Hopefully not physically or concretely (although -), but with Trump (and later possibly eight years of J.D. Vance), the U.S. is no longer a partner that Europe can count on.

Why not? Because the absolute pillar of peace is predictability – I trust that you have my back and I have yours, I trust that my neighbor and trading partner will not invade my country etc. The European Union was constructed along those lines of thinking. And it has worked incredibly well for seven decades.

For many decades, we Europeans couldn’t be bothered to get our own security act together, but would rather freeload on Washington. Trump is absolutely correct on this particular point, we suckered on the U.S.

Now Europe needs to look inwards, strengthen our thinking in order to look outwards. Our first step should be to include Ukraine. We have to understand that we Europeans will be paying for the rebuilding of Ukraine, one way or another, sooner or later; so, let’s do this with Ukraine as a part of our extremely successful union, because in this way, Kyiv would be obligated to follow European rules and norms, oversight and democratic controls.

And this brings us back to ‘Gorba’: in 1987 he suggested ‘A Common European Home’ - ”a Europe based on common values without walls":

“We are resolutely against the division of the continent into military blocs facing each other, against the accumulation of military arsenals in Europe, against everything that is the source of the threat of war.”

This is literally the opposite of Vladimir Putin. 40 years wasted.

In fact, the speech about 'Our Common European Home’ had been written by Gorbachev’s close advisor Aleksandr Yakovlev. Yakovlev was the real father of Perestroika, Glasnost and New Political Thinking which the more photogenic Gorbachev got credit for.

Whatever people in the former Soviet Union today say about them, these guys tried. Yes, they did not go far enough, and true, Gorby harbored unrealistic ideas of saving the Soviet Union. The much more clear-eyed Yakovlev - whom I got to know very well, I would even call him a friend - often told me that he knew that his Glasnost - which he called “the biggest democratic experiment in history” - would end with the break-up of the Soviet Union. “But we need to develop real democracy before that happens,” he explained to me in 1990, “otherwise we will simply leave behind a string of mini-USSRs, with the same crooks in charge as today.” Sure, you can argue that Yakovlev was playing “big brother,” trying to control the process, but history has proven him right. Sadly right. Brutally right. Many of the former Soviet republics are still today - 30+ years after independence - run by the same crooks that Yakovlev warned against, their sons, or their closest associates.

Yakovlev dreamed, as he told me, of “a whole Europe.” He wished for the Europeans to rise above petty squabbles and disagreements for a greater good. “People crave stability, Michael,” he told me in 1994, “I guess that from the outside, for you, the Soviet Union looked like stability, a for-ever-monster - but in reality living in the Soviet Union was a day to day little war, just to survive. People - exactly like countries - need stability, predictability. Otherwise, they will be scared and can easily be manipulated.”

Sadly, with the little KGBist entrenched in the Kremlin, ‘a Common European Home’ will not happen (right now), but we have wasted many years expanding Europe to also include Ukraine. I see signs that some of the more progressive, intelligent of Europe’s leaders are ‘getting there’ - by studying the history and making their choices based on that: Poland’s Radek Sikorski, several of the Baltic and Nordic leaders. Both you and I know the very reason why we should listen to Sikorski and the Baltic leaders.

And let’s end with ‘Gorba’: “History punishes those that come late to it,” he warned.

Only one thing can save Ukraine and Europe now: Europe.