Božo Repe

Mikhail Gorbachev was the most important Soviet politician between 1985 and 1991. In March 1985 he succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and in 1988 he formally became head of state (taking over the function of Chairman of Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR). With Ronald Reagan and later George Bush he signed a series of treaties ending the arms’ race and he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In 1987 he initiated two reforms he called “glasnost and perestroika.” “Glasnost” gave the people a possibility to publicly speak their mind for the first time since the creation of Soviet Union. “Perestroika” was an unsuccessful economic reform that drastically lowered living standards and made Gorbachev very unpopular. In October 1989 he visited the German Democratic Republic, where he was received enthusiastically by the people. There were mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Leipzig and Berlin. Gorbachev did not support East German leader Erich Honecker, who led the DDR since 1971, and wanted to violently suppress the demonstrations. So Honecker resigned. Gorbachev also did not send Soviet troops to suppress democratic movements in other Eastern European countries. By doing this he renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty. This led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunification of Germany and the end of the Warsaw Pact. In July 1990 Gorbachev agreed with German chancellor Helmut Kohl that the unified Germany can stay in NATO. After Reunification the Soviet Army was supposed to stay on the territory of the former DDR for another four years, while NATO would refrain from sending its troops there in that time. The future German Army was supposed to have 370.000 soldiers. The United States and Western states promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand East, but they did not honour this.

In March 1990, after the change of Soviet Constitution, Gorbachev was elected President of Soviet Union which was already starting to disintegrate. Baltic republics were the first to declare independence and others followed shorty: Moldavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan. This prompted part of the political elite in cooperation with the military and KGB to try to remove Gorbachev from power in August 1991. They put him under house arrest in Yalta, where he went on vacation. Because of mass opposition to the putsch, the support of recently elected President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin and help from the Army stationed in Moscow, the coup d’état failed. On August 24 1991 Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the CP. On December 21 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Commonwealth of Independent States was created. Presidents of 15 Soviet republics concluded the Soviet Union does not exist anymore and Gorbachev should resign from Presidency, while the republics formed a loose confederation called Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia became legal successor of the Soviet Union. The three Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and Georgia who had already declared independence did not join CIS. On December 25 Gorbachev resigned and central institutions of Soviet Union were disbanded. After 69 years of existence the Soviet Union was officially defunct.

Gorbachev became very popular in the West due to his role in ending the Cold War, while in Russia he was blamed for the break-up of Soviet Union and loss of international political power. He created his foundation in 1992, while his lack of popularity was exposed when he ran for President of Russia in 1996 and got only 1% of the vote. He later became a critic of Putin, but at least formally and publicly Russian political elite holds him in high regard.

Gorbachev visited Yugoslavia in March 1988. During his visit he came to Slovenia and called it a “socialist laboratory”. Yugoslav leadership tried hard to avoid him visiting the “secessionist” republic. Next year, in March 1989, Yugoslav defence minister Veljko Kadijević secretly flew to Moscow and tried to get help and support from defence minister Dmitry Yazov for the implementation of the state of emergency in Yugoslavia. He did not get it. It is not known if Yazov consulted Gorbachev on this matter, but the rejection was definitely aligned with his politics.

When in Slovenia, Gorbachev visited a large private farm in the vicinity of Radovljica and the Iskra Avtomatika plant. From the top of Iskra Building in Ljubljana, he had a look at the city. People of Ljubljana gave him a heartfelt welcome. He was genuinely impressed with what he saw (as he told representatives of Slovenian leadership) and he wrote into the book of honorary visitors: “I’d like to take this opportunity to express my admiration for the great achievements of the working people of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia in economic, social and cultural fields, which were achieved in the years of building Socialism.” Slovenia was for him the West of the Eastern world. But he did surprise his host Milan Kučan by saying the national question in the Soviet Union was solved once and for all and needed no amending. His thoughts on “perestroika” were a far cry from the economic reforms Slovenia implemented in the Sixties, at a time of Kavčič’s “party liberalism”. Well, great changes in little Slovenia, “a rich communist place”, as Wall Street Journal wrote at the time, didn’t mean anything globally. For the world, the great reformer was Gorbachev. He represented hope the Berlin Wall would fall. The United States and Western leaders off course wanted the Soviet Union to break-up and lose its geostrategic power, but not in such a way to endanger the peace and good living in the West.