Gorbachov
I was born in 1950. The Korean war was just beginning and the cold war was heating up, the Soviet Union had detonated their first nuclear weapon a few months before. My childhood and schooling in Puerto Rico were punctuated with nuclear attack drills, narratives that painted all soviets as evil and argued for the absolute terror of communism – which was reinforced with Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba and his drift into a communist ideology. On October 1962 all those fears became a reality. The 22nd of October President John F. Kennedy told the nation that a week earlier air surveillance had detected nuclear missiles in Cuba. The world was at the brink of a nuclear confrontation. I clearly remember looking out the window of my bedroom waiting to see the mushroom cloud – the end of the world. Those 13 days of October ended peacefully right around my birthday – a great gift indeed. But for people of my age that was just a peak of a period of super power tension that had a defining moment with the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961, which was followed by many surrogate real wars and violence. There was Chile and Salvador Allende, and the Iran-Contra affair, Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and let us not forget the Vietnam war.
The cold war was our norm, we just got used to it and truly believed that it would be eternal, almost a necessity to avoid direct nuclear confrontation. The MAD (mutually assured destruction) idea kept us away from the brink, although we constantly played near it. Then came Mikhail Gorbachov. Cajoled and encouraged by the quintessential cold warrior, Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev dismantled the Berlin Wall AND the Soviet Union. I cannot exaggerate how implausible those events looked to me. Practically overnight he changed the world. The burden of MAD was lifted off the baby boomers back.
I am not a historian and I can’t hardly claim that I understand the forces, and the thinking, that led Gorbachov to implement the policies that resulted in the dramatic events that thawed the Cold War. But like many things in history, I do know that it would not have happened without him. I also know that irrelevant of the motivation it must have taken extraordinary courage and conviction from his part to dismantle the apparatus of the mighty Soviet Union. How he was able to do it is a mystery to me, that he survived it is simply incredible. He is an example of how one person, one leader, can change the course of history.
Unfortunately, Russia and the west failed to capitalize on Gorbachov’s miracle. My sense is that we missed the opportunity to help the Russian people redefine themselves. We were more interested in proclaiming the triumph of our way of life and on trying to derive the most economic gain from the chaos that resulted after the dissolution of the Soviet Union than on trying to help in the emergence of a stable new democracy. As it commonly happens, a demagogue strong man emerged, appealing to nationalist inclinations that always surface when people feel that they have lost respect and power and perceive abuse and/or exploitation. Mr. Putin is now putting the whole world in danger and it is not clear how to stop him. I cannot help but think about how Gorbachev was feeling at the end of his life, wondering whether his extraordinary act of courage was worth it and seeing his memory directly and indirectly tarnished in his beloved country.
I, for one, want to state that I will never forget what he did. He truly changed the world and the life of many like me.