Earlier this month, Mikhail Gorbachev celebrated his 91st birthday in obscurity at his home near Moscow, the forgotten leader of Russia’s brief, unsuccessful move toward democracy at home and on its borders.
It’s been more than three decades since Gorbachev presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the liberation of its satellite nations. One of democracy’s greatest modern triumphs, Vladimir Putin called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century.”
Recognizing its economic weaknesses, Gorbachev acquiesced in the Soviet empire’s peaceful breakup. He refused to intervene as the nations on its western and southern flanks re-embraced democracy and renounced their Cold War-era ties.
That’s the history Putin wants to reverse with his brutal, unprovoked attempt to subjugate Ukraine — one of the onetime Soviet republics that joined Eastern European nations in declaring independence.
The outcome remains in doubt, but the war has clearly not gone as Putin expected. The vaunted Russian military has met the fierce resistance of a people fighting for their homeland like the Russians themselves resisted the Nazi Wehrmacht in World War II, a history Putin knows well since his parents lived through the 28-month siege of Leningrad.
Putin’s invasion raises the question of whether, in the 21st century, the power of the sword can prove mightier than the power of ideas, whether it is ultimately sustainable for an autocrat wielding military force to quash the natural yearning by peoples seeking freedom to live their lives and choose their leaders.
Russia and the West are not only engaged in a military and geopolitical battle, but one between the autocratic heritage of one and the democratic traditions of the other. Ukraine has made clear which side it prefers.
The brief Gorbachev era – and the presidency of his successor Boris Yeltsin – serve as a reminder that Russia did not have to wind up this way. But decades of political and economic corruption, and its lack of a democratic tradition, helped Putin undercut the era that Gorbachev defined by the words “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness).
That internal conflict was vividly captured recently by veteran CNN correspondent Nic Robertson. “The world was changing, the Cold War thawing, new horizons beckoning, and a generation of Russians was about to taste the freedoms they craved,” he wrote, recalling the halcyon days of Gorbachev’s 1990 Moscow.
Even after Yeltsin, impatient with the pace of reform, forced Gorbachev from power less than two years later, life in the Russia capital continued that course, Robertson said. “Nights in Moscow were wild with revelers dancing in – and often on – the bars.”
I visited Russia twice during those years, once as a journalist, once as a tourist, and the lively centers of both St. Petersburg and Moscow had come to resemble Western European cities more than the gray, humorless society I first encountered in 1959.
But as the 21st century loomed, Yeltsin, alcoholic and unreliable, “plucked Putin from among the money-corrupted milieu in the Kremlin to replace him as Russian president – and, in return, Yeltsin, who had battled corruption allegations, got immunity from prosecution,” Robertson said.
Initially, “there was a glimmer of the modernizer about Russia’s new leader, but that reputation didn’t last long,” he said. Despite Russia’s growing acceptance by the West, Putin remained obsessed by Russia’s diminished global role.
In time, the true Putin emerged, the onetime secret police operative who was more the heir of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin than of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. (Eastern Europe fared better. Most nations became Western allies as NATO members, maintaining varying degrees of democracy.)
But the West seemingly took two decades to realize Putin in no ways resembles the leader British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hailed in 1984 as one with whom “we can do business” and with whom President Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush negotiated significant nuclear arms cuts.
President George W. Bush, naively positive, said he looked in Putin’s eye and “found him very straightforward and trustworthy.” Similarly hopeful, President Barack Obama mocked Republican rival Mitt Romney’s description of Russia as our “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” accusing him of reviving 1980s foreign policy and adding, “The Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
President Donald Trump claimed friendship with Putin but embarrassed the United States at their Helsinki summit by publicly accepting the Russian leader’s disavowal of his interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Some Trump allies argue the former president’s bluster and calculated uncertainty forestalled Russia from attacking Ukraine. John Bolton, the veteran GOP hardliner who was Trump’s national security adviser, disputes that.
He told SiriusXM’s Julie Mason he thought Putin saw “the president’s hostility of NATO” and felt a re-elected Trump would leave the Western treaty, and “just ease Putin’s path that much more.”
Biden, more clear-headed about Putin, initially seemed to think negotiation was possible. But when American intelligence concluded the Russian president was planning war, Biden not only responded forcefully but forged a degree of Western unity that seemed impossible beforehand.
Whatever ultimately happens, the outcome will be disastrous for Ukraine. Even if it survives, it will emerge as a battered, brutalized country, though one which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s heroic leadership has enabled to hold its national head high.
But it will also be disastrous for Russia and what could have been, had not Vladimir Putin – much like Donald Trump – been obsessed with reversing history instead of advancing it.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.