"I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to process this fact. How could Russians not revere the man who climbed down from total power over them and then willingly went away?"
I think it's easy to process this fact. As a kid with a familial connection to anti-Communism, I was pretty down with "the Soviet Union and World Communism…
"I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to process this fact. How could Russians not revere the man who climbed down from total power over them and then willingly went away?"
I think it's easy to process this fact. As a kid with a familial connection to anti-Communism, I was pretty down with "the Soviet Union and World Communism is an evil empire" and so I'm happy that Soviet Communism collapsed. Sometimes, we get nice things.
On the other side of the coin, it's pretty clear that the end of the Soviet Union was a massive loss in national pride. From that perspective, it's not a surprise that the person responsible for that would be denigrated. (It is a damned shame that the Russia of Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon" never came to be, i.e. a struggling fledgling democracy that was finally going to commercialize its natural resources on a world-class scale.) It makes you wonder if the rest of the world bungled the intervening years by not offering an opportunity to regain that pride in a different way.
I like what JVL said regarding Gorbachev stepping down voluntarily. Americans have a great tradition of that, and we're proud of it. George Washington stepped down after two terms, and by God, if it was good enough for ol' George, it was pretty darn good for ~150 years until FDR, and up until the last feller, we've had a long tradition of leaders leaving office. It's a shame that Russians (and Trump) don't recognize what a gift that is.
This: “On the other side of the coin, it's pretty clear that the end of the Soviet Union was a massive loss in national pride.” Throughout history it seems like pride was all they had at times.
My husband and I were talking about Gorbachev last night. We were once again appreciating what he did and why he did it.
The bigger problem is that the 1991-2000 period, when Russians had political freedom like never before, is better remembered for crime, corruption and economic chaos.
There's a lot of talk about what the Western countries could have done differently to keep Russia from sliding back into authoritarianism. But I don't know what we could have done to prevent this, short of occupying the largest country on earth.
Agreed. To vastly oversimplify, Russians view "winning" as the fundamental quality of the tsar. By this metric, Putin is, and Stalin was, a tsar. Nicholas II (humiliating defeat to Japan, gross mismanagement of WWI) and Gorbachev were decidedly not. Obviously the book hasn't been fully written on Putin yet and he still may go down to ignominious defeat, but as of right now he's viewed as the second coming of Stalin in Motherland.
Yup. HW made a point of not doing victory laps about it, which was a smart move I think. But for the average Russian nationalist, the humiliation was already complete no matter what we did in the aftermath. It's like how MAGA was always going to hate post-college progressives no matter how many olive branches were extended. Russians were always going to hate western democracies simply as a matter of haves and have nots and who gets to tell who to do what. This was always about who is preaching to who and who is coercing who. They hate us because we moralize to them on human rights while our police shoot unarmed suspects when they get scared enough and our occupation in Afghanistan collapsed just as catastrophically as theirs did. We've been the ones coercing them since they've been born. They want to coerce us now. They want the shoe to be on the other foot. They want us to feel like they felt when we were the ones forcing ourselves on their world. Now they're forcing themselves on our world via Ukraine, the global inflation that ensued as a result, and the economic pain we're going to go through to control that inflation domestically. It's Putin's turn to push the buttons now, not the west's. At least that's my interpretation for what's driving Russian anti-western nationalism.
"I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to process this fact. How could Russians not revere the man who climbed down from total power over them and then willingly went away?"
I think it's easy to process this fact. As a kid with a familial connection to anti-Communism, I was pretty down with "the Soviet Union and World Communism is an evil empire" and so I'm happy that Soviet Communism collapsed. Sometimes, we get nice things.
On the other side of the coin, it's pretty clear that the end of the Soviet Union was a massive loss in national pride. From that perspective, it's not a surprise that the person responsible for that would be denigrated. (It is a damned shame that the Russia of Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon" never came to be, i.e. a struggling fledgling democracy that was finally going to commercialize its natural resources on a world-class scale.) It makes you wonder if the rest of the world bungled the intervening years by not offering an opportunity to regain that pride in a different way.
I like what JVL said regarding Gorbachev stepping down voluntarily. Americans have a great tradition of that, and we're proud of it. George Washington stepped down after two terms, and by God, if it was good enough for ol' George, it was pretty darn good for ~150 years until FDR, and up until the last feller, we've had a long tradition of leaders leaving office. It's a shame that Russians (and Trump) don't recognize what a gift that is.
This: “On the other side of the coin, it's pretty clear that the end of the Soviet Union was a massive loss in national pride.” Throughout history it seems like pride was all they had at times.
My husband and I were talking about Gorbachev last night. We were once again appreciating what he did and why he did it.
The Russian people don’t appreciate freedom because they’ve never had it. (Unless you count the interregnum from 1991 - 2000.)
They’re a backward people who’ve always been ruled by tyrants.
The bigger problem is that the 1991-2000 period, when Russians had political freedom like never before, is better remembered for crime, corruption and economic chaos.
There's a lot of talk about what the Western countries could have done differently to keep Russia from sliding back into authoritarianism. But I don't know what we could have done to prevent this, short of occupying the largest country on earth.
Agreed. To vastly oversimplify, Russians view "winning" as the fundamental quality of the tsar. By this metric, Putin is, and Stalin was, a tsar. Nicholas II (humiliating defeat to Japan, gross mismanagement of WWI) and Gorbachev were decidedly not. Obviously the book hasn't been fully written on Putin yet and he still may go down to ignominious defeat, but as of right now he's viewed as the second coming of Stalin in Motherland.
George H.W. Bush did warn us about the perils of gloating; I remember that much about his presidency.
Yup. HW made a point of not doing victory laps about it, which was a smart move I think. But for the average Russian nationalist, the humiliation was already complete no matter what we did in the aftermath. It's like how MAGA was always going to hate post-college progressives no matter how many olive branches were extended. Russians were always going to hate western democracies simply as a matter of haves and have nots and who gets to tell who to do what. This was always about who is preaching to who and who is coercing who. They hate us because we moralize to them on human rights while our police shoot unarmed suspects when they get scared enough and our occupation in Afghanistan collapsed just as catastrophically as theirs did. We've been the ones coercing them since they've been born. They want to coerce us now. They want the shoe to be on the other foot. They want us to feel like they felt when we were the ones forcing ourselves on their world. Now they're forcing themselves on our world via Ukraine, the global inflation that ensued as a result, and the economic pain we're going to go through to control that inflation domestically. It's Putin's turn to push the buttons now, not the west's. At least that's my interpretation for what's driving Russian anti-western nationalism.