In anticipation of the upcoming documentary Meeting Gorbachev, I found this little piece about Soviet History as their last leader tried to stem the superpower’s decline. I’m looking forward to seeing this movie: German director Werner Herzog will be interviewing Gorbachev, a man who has mostly “disappeared” in Russia.
I do hope History will also be objective and honest when it comes to him. He’s no saint. To be the top person running the Soviet Union, one has to be ruthless and not put up with any guff so there’s no doubt the KGB ever eased up. However, Gorbachev did show how the country was starting to turn the corner in its internal and possibly external policies (finally ended their war in Afghanistan, allowing a McDonald’s in Moscow, serious peace talks with St. Reagan).
The above link tells the story of how he proposed incentivizing Soviet farmers to operate as they do in the West and maybe this would cut down on how much food was imported. There were other instances of Gorbachev pushing for glasnost (openness to ideas) in order to solve the numerous problems he inherited from the stagnation Leonid Brezhnev’s mindset of opposing anything “not invented here.” We have the same stupidity in the US lately, it’s called American Exceptionalism.