Nearly a decade ago, the National Post commissioned several columnists to prepare advance obituary columns for some of history’s aging giants. George Jonas, who had fled communist Hungary after Soviet troops crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was asked to write about former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then 81. Gorbachev, who died Tuesday, ended up outliving Jonas, who died in 2016. We present here Jonas’s reflections on Gorbachev, written in 2013 but never published until now.
There was no glasnost, there was only maskirovka. We see that now. That’s why a former KGB runs the place. Not that he’s doing a bad job fighting the globalists, MRGA.
“MRGA”
Russia was never great. Always a brutal backward shithole. Russians were most miserable when they were freest. “None is fearing us anymore” was the phrase used by average russians on the streets, an expression of a very real trauma at the time when they had the best opportunity to create relative prosperity. A nation of mental slaves have of course squandered it.
As for Pootin doing a great job fighting the globalists. That is wishful thinking and willful blindness. At the extreme orc cost, he is dragging russia into even higher levels of poverty and backwardness while committing genocide at the same time. And all for nothing.
loved Georges columns.. have a few books of his. He had quite a life.
Gorby was the best of a bad lot, I think we could say without much hesitation, if by “lot” we mean anyone who ruled Russia after the demise of the czars. He was a relatively decent man although he never threw off his core assumptions which of course were essentially both wrong and evil to a great extent, but I think he had some concept of the limits to which he should pursue policies of the most evil variation, for example, he largely wound down the gulag system in the mid to late 1980s. He was confronted with a reality that his side had lost an expensive global arms race and knew that the end was approaching for a system that could not be sustained. Putin, I believe, shared some of his better qualities at first, but became very disillusioned with the west when they continued to treat him like a thug, which ironically turned him into a greater thug than perhaps he ever was up until then. I used to think of Putin as a mixed bag but this Ukraine business has revealed a darker side that will unfortunately become his legacy, to what extent yet unknown and of course even worse men wait in the shadows, while our side of the global aspect of this conflict are hardly any better themselves, meaning that as always, the average people without power or influence are getting the shaft and the big wigs are making lots of money.
Gorbachev himself could have foreseen very little of the outcome of the end of the cold war, not that anyone can point to any body of work that distinguishes themselves from the general total ignorance of the world that would replace the more certain byzantine moral certainties of the world we left behind. Few anti-communists would have foreseen that in retrospect, the reform communism of Gorbachev enjoying some sort of partial and sustaining success in the USSR might have been our one way out of the mess the world is in now, maintaining a balance that disappeared to be replaced by even worse things in our time. But let’s face it, Gorbachev was never going to make that experiment a sustained success, he would very likely have been forced out of power by hard liners within a few years, in fact that did happen briefly before he voluntarily stepped aside for Yeltsin’s emergence. That man of course was unfit to lead and while some of his ideas might have been good, his performance was mediocre at best. A vaccuum was created, Putin filled that vaccuum and will always be running the show until nature or fellow men intervene.
Due to very strange circumstances,he visited my kids school in Calgary.Very little fanfare I actually didn’t believe them at the time.there is a commemorative plaque
It is ironic that Gorbachev would pass on on the last day of summer. https://youtu.be/6VqiMQoMXmw
The last of summer in North America is September 21st.
“Gorbachev did come to see that the Soviet empire was flawed, but not that it was evil. He wanted to fix it, not nix it. Yet within six years after he assumed leadership, to the astonishment of all, the mighty system that ruled one sixth of the Earth and influenced much of the rest, suddenly folded. Liquidated on Gorbachev’s command, the Soviet Union went out of business. It surrendered, virtually without firing a shot. Considering its coercive might, including its fearsome apparatus of internal repression, the Soviet realm became probably history’s first empire to give up so much with so little resistance.”
Why do I feel this will be the epitaph of the United States before 2030?
The epitaph for the USA will be that the Marxists closed up their penny ante mom-and-pop operation known as the Soviet Union and decided to do a hostile takeover of the lucrative big-box chain known as America instead.
Several years ago when we were in St. Lucia my wife and I met a British couple. He was born in Russia and had lived there till he moved to Scotland to attend university immediately after the dismantling of the USSR. Most of his family was still in Russia and he had been back to visit on several occasions over the years. I asked him how the economic and liberty situations were now compared to back then. “Well, you’re able to buy a lot more stuff, that’s for sure. But when you have no understanding of freedom, the government doesn’t have to give you very much to make you think you have it.”
Precisely.
Gorbachev simply pandered to the masses in order to save a gangrenous system.
Saint John Paul II helped nail communism’s coffin shut.
Gorbachev should have known it was over.
Gorbachev ended the tradition of using force when the Soviet Union’s East European client states erupted in protests. Khrushchev crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Brezhnev did the same in Czechoslovakia during the “Prague Spring” of 1969. When East Germany’s Erich Honecker asked him to crush the protests in 1989, Gorbachev said no.
And with no threat of violence, the whole system collapsed.
RIP
“With no threat of violence, the system collapsed.”
Reminds me of current conditions here.
The system collapsed when Poland plowed through the system.
Mr Gorbachev may have passed, but the thing on his head will live forever,
Ouch.
I think Jamie MacMaster and Sooke have perfectly described what Canada is reversing into…it’s like our movie is running backwards:
“when you have no understanding of freedom, the government doesn’t have to give you very much to make you think you have it.”
“And with no threat of violence, the whole system collapsed.”
When you have no understanding of freedom, the government doesn’t have to take very much to completely take it away. With a few small threats of violence the whole system came into effect.
No democracy has survived past 200 years. No socialist/communist country has survived 100 years. Gorbachev’s image was just that, an image. He was a socialist through and through. Whatever his inner thoughts actually were he still had Reagan on one side and hard liners on the other.
His character is revealed by the fact that he rose to power in an evil society full of dangerous people.
The US (and Canada) is being destroyed in front of our eyes by malevolent people who are telling us that is their goal. I believe this winter will see the collapse of the electrical grid which, combined with food shortages, will end our current society.
A malevolent socialist society will take its place. Gorbachev will take comfort knowing that they won in the end.
Evil doesn’t win in the end.
After all, Gorbachev presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Thank you for posting this. I don’t regularly go to NP, so only see worthy posts when they are linked from SDA.
George Jonas is always an interesting read. Having lived through that period and seeing the Soviet Union fall, it is frustrating to see that we could be learning so much from that period, yet people who weren’t born don’t know about it, and many who lived through it just don’t want to learn. We are seeing the same disastrous mistakes.
Gorbachev ended the Cold War the same way that Robert E. Lee ended the Civil War.
Reagan and Thatcher ended the Cold War.
The Second World War ended December 25, 1991, at a stroke of Gorbachev’s pen*, marking the USSR’s defeat.
No Nuremberg trials of the Soviet war criminals.
* (Actually his pen broke, so he borrowed one from a foreign journalist.)
Indeed.
I argue for these trials but people want to forget.
And forget they did.
And here we are, with Putin.
It is hard to demand trails, when those on trail are idolized by brainwashed orcs, for whom freedom for them and others was the biggest trauma in their lives.
It was a moral failure to stand against communism.
“No Nuremberg trials of the Soviet war criminals.”
… or their agents, who then took prominent political positions in Germany, Austria, Poland, Finland etc, while some managed to purge most of them over time, others like the first two listed above, are still manipulated by the same operators.