Adam Michnik, the longtime Polish dissident and human-rights activist, certainly understood the reflexive cruelty of the communist system and the tenacity of Soviet imperialism better than most—from beatings, jailings, and the 1981 crushing of the Solidarity movement that he helped found and lead. Thus he reveled in Gorbachev’s encouragement of democratization in Eastern Europe and marveled at the emergence from this system of a leader so liberal and audacious—describing him as a “genetic error.” Andrei Gromyko—the longtime Soviet foreign minister who helped craft that imperialism from the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia through the suppression of Solidarity and beyond (until Gorbachev fired him shortly after taking power in 1985)—saw the same traits but characterized them somewhat differently: Gorbachev, he said, was like a “Martian.” From their diametrically opposing perspectives, Michnik and Gromyko agreed on one thing with absolute certainty: Gorbachev was anything but a “quintessential Soviet apparatchik.”

Could he have designed better economic reforms? Yes, absolutely. But try as you might, you will not find a practicable plan for wholesale reform and rapid market transition from either Soviet or Western economists in the early-mid 1980s. (And in any case, Western economists were rarely found among the ex-collective farm chairmen and factory managers who made up the Politburo.) Such proposals as existed were either impractically vague and utopian, or offered what are now denounced as “half measures.” Which goes to say that Gorbachev did the best he could with limited analytical resources, and only in looking back is it “obvious” what he should have done at this or that crossroads—or even that this or that was a crossroads. Even with 20/20 hindsight we still haven’t found a feasible alternative to Gorbachev’s piecemeal approach. Those most frequently touted either ignore the powerful vested interests of the old USSR and assume that legions of military-industrial managers would meekly retire to an imaginary new private sector (and they also assume massive hard-currency reserves to cushion years of dire austerity and a lost social-safety net). Or they follow some variant of the Chinese path and impose extremely painful, wrenching reforms in the absence of any democratization. The former was obviously impossible, and the latter clearly unacceptable.

Couldn’t he have just announced in 1989, as separatist currents grew strong and some republics declared independence, that the USSR was indeed a “hateful and oppressive” empire, that he apologized for the decades of communist rule and now demanded “a full reckoning with the Soviet past,” and that the republics were now all free to leave the USSR? This is wildly unrealistic, and needs no counterfactual analysis to demonstrate; the hardline forces that arrayed against Gorbachev—those that demanded he “restore order,” that called for imposition of martial law, that repeatedly sparked violence, and that twice tried to oust him—were driven by the singular imperative of preserving the Soviet Union. Yet this is exactly what Applebaum suggests Gorbachev should have done. And the explanation for this incredible argument lies less in what was possible in 1989, and more in trying to blame him for Putin’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.

The fact that Gorbachev approved Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea was, according to Applebaum, “an action that helped catalyze the wave of imperial nostalgia that has now brought us the war in Ukraine.” This is ludicrous, both for claiming that Putin was swept along by a popular “wave” in deciding to invade Ukraine, and also for blaming this apparently irresistible force on the aged Gorbachev’s influence over Russia—when he was actually scorned and ignored in his own country. In fact, this scorn stemmed precisely from belief that “He gave in to the West, and gave up the Soviet empire, without a fight.” Far from a precursor to Putin, Gorbachev was in every respect the anti-Putin. And the bloody consequences of Putin’s imperial nostalgia today should serve as a reminder of what the Soviet hardliners arrayed against Gorbachev were fully prepared to do to preserve the Soviet empire.

But Gorbachev “never spoke out” against the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, critics complain, overlooking that as he struggled with his final illness the ninety-one-year-old Gorbachev spent most of his final months in and out of the hospital (and so was incapable of catalyzing waves of anything). But what Gorbachev had done repeatedly, and for over twenty years, was to criticize the expansion of NATO, something that apparently makes him a virtual accomplice to Putin. Simply by being the main witness to the broken promises of 1990—that if Moscow assented to German reunification and membership in NATO, then the alliance “would not expand one inch Eastward”—Gorbachev was a constant reminder that, if anything, it was the West’s continual expansion of military power directed at Russia that “helped catalyze a wave of imperial nostalgia.”

This argument is radioactive in today’s climate, as anyone who suggests that Western policies such as NATO expansion—along with America’s “export of democracy” through regime change, or abrogation of key arms control treaties—have contributed to the souring of Russia-Western relations will quickly learn. There can be absolutely no crediting of the Russian perspective—or risk being branded Putin’s dupe—since Russians are inveterate imperialists, from Gorbachev, to Putin, to the general population wallowing in “imperial nostalgia.” As conservative columnist George F. Will once claimed in arguing for NATO enlargement, “expansionism is in Russia’s national DNA”—an argument now essentially echoed by many Western liberals.

WILL, AN unabashed Russophobe, is incensed at tributes to Gorbachev that place a Soviet apparatchik alongside an American hero—President Ronald Reagan—as statesmen who worked together to end the Cold War. Echoing the “he didn’t know what he was doing” sneer, Will argued in the Washington Post that “Gorbachev’s reputation rests on the world’s amnesia,” namely that he “stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.” Maybe it is Will’s reputation that rests on his readers’ amnesia, since in 1988 it was Will who denounced the Cold War-ending nuclear arms control agreements hammered out by Reagan and Gorbachev as a “chimera” that reflected the “incoherence” of Reagan’s foreign policy.

Personal animus rings through these postmortem denunciations of Gorbachev, which are extraordinarily petty when they turn to Gorbachev’s life after leaving office. “He was invited [to Cold War anniversaires] as a trophy, a living, breathing souvenir” and “He started a think tank called the Gorbachev Foundation. He did charity work. He tried and failed to start [a] museum of Stalinist terror.” Such descriptions are not just mean, but ignorant. More accurate would be:

He supported independent media, particularly the newspaper Novaya Gazeta which he launched with his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winnings. He founded and supported Green International, an NGO dedicated to environmental protection and education. He raised money to build a state-of-the-art hospital for the treatment of childhood leukemia in St. Petersburg. He sustained the Gorbachev Foundation, which not only maintains a presidential archive and runs an active program of political seminars and historical conferences in Moscow, but also collaborates with Western research groups such as the National Security Archive to translate, edit, and publish hundreds of documents and memoirs. And even if largely ignored in both Russia and the West, he continued to advocate international cooperation on pressing global issues, to lament the squandering of the opportunities created by the Cold War’s end, and to decry both unilateralism abroad and the fraying of democracy at home—whether in Russia or the West.

Ignoring most of this, Gessen instead mocks the elderly Gorbachev as somebody who “rambled,” “went off on tangents,” and “who could never finish a sentence or get to the punch line—and whose accent marked him, to the end, as a country bumpkin.” Yes, shockingly, as he neared the end of life Gorbachev failed to improve his diction or elevate his accent (though I can attest that he certainly finished sentences and told jokes with sardonic punch lines). And that apparently is what galls most of all—that he wasn’t a cultured Russian intelligent but a hayseed apparatchik who soared high above his humble origins, accomplished historic deeds and gained international acclaim, and then had the temerity to look at us and say: “You have become arrogant, a danger not only to the world but to yourself. America needs perestroika too.” As psychologists tell us, an angry, disingenuous, ad hominem attack is often simply confirmation that the criticism has hit home.

Robert David English, who teaches International Relations and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California, is the author of Russia and the Idea of the West. He interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev four times between 1996 and 2019.

Image: Reuters.