06/09/2026
Gorbachev: The Beginning of the End of the Soviet Union.
The West gave Gorbachev a Nobel Prize. Russia later gave him 0.51 percent. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in transforming East-West relations. Six years later, he asked Russian voters to return him to political power. Only 386,069 chose him. He finished seventh, with 0.51 percent of the vote. Few careers expose the difference between foreign admiration and domestic memory so brutally.
Gorbachev had not come to power intending to destroy the Soviet Union. When he became General Secretary in 1985, he wanted to rescue it. The economy was stagnating, technology lagged behind the West and the cost of the arms race was enormous. Perestroika was supposed to reform socialism; glasnost was supposed to make the system more honest and responsive. Instead, opening the political system exposed grievances the Communist Party had suppressed for decades, while partial economic reforms disrupted old mechanisms without creating a functioning replacement.
Abroad, the same decisions looked very different. Gorbachev negotiated the 1987 INF Treaty with Ronald Reagan, accepted a dramatic reduction in Cold War confrontation and, crucially, refused to use Soviet military power to preserve communist governments across Eastern Europe in 1989. Poland changed government. The Berlin Wall opened. Communist regimes fell one after another. In 1990, Gorbachev accepted German reunification and eventually agreed that a united Germany could remain in NATO. Western governments saw a Soviet leader choosing negotiation where his predecessors had often relied on coercion.
That record should not be turned into sainthood. Soviet forces used deadly violence during his rule, including in Tbilisi, Baku and Vilnius, and responsibility for those operations remains part of the argument over his record. Nor did he simply hand freedom to Eastern Europe out of generosity; Soviet weakness, economic pressure and mass movements inside those countries mattered enormously. But one fact separates Gorbachev from earlier Kremlin leaders: when Moscow's empire in Eastern Europe began to break apart, he did not send Soviet armies across the region to rebuild it.
For millions inside the USSR, however, the price of his era was measured differently. Shelves emptied, economic uncertainty grew, ethnic conflicts intensified and the authority of the state weakened. Republics demanded sovereignty. In August 1991, hard-line officials tried to overthrow him and placed him under house arrest in Crimea. The coup failed, but Gorbachev returned to Moscow with far less power. Boris Yeltsin emerged stronger, the Communist Party was shattered, and the republics accelerated their departure from the Union.
Gorbachev still did not want the USSR to disappear. In his resignation speech on 25 December 1991, he said he had supported the sovereignty of the republics while also fighting to preserve a union state. By then, leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus had already declared that the Soviet Union was ending and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned from a presidency whose country was vanishing beneath it. Much of the economic trauma Russians associate with the 1990s came after he left office, under a radically different reform program. Memory rarely observes such neat boundaries.
The contrast survived him. Western leaders remembered the man who helped reduce the nuclear danger and allowed the Cold War order to end without a Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe. Many Russians remembered lost security, lost territory and the collapse of a superpower. In 2022, a Russian state poll found 74 percent expressing an unfavorable view of him. The two judgments were never really about the same achievement. In Oslo in 1990, Gorbachev was rewarded for helping dismantle the Cold War. In Russia in 1996, he received 0.51 percent for what that transformation had felt like at home.
