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Death of Mikhail Gorbachev: The Hero of Some, the Traitor of Others

When Nikita Khrushchev died in 1971, he did not receive the same honors as other leaders of the Soviet Union. He was not buried in the necropolis of the Kremlin wall like Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. We didn’t give him a state funeral.

He was quickly buried in the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. His funerary stele, half white and half black, represents the good deeds and the mistakes of man. A very funny half-homage for the one who nevertheless lifted the veil on the crimes committed by Stalin during his brutal reign.

While Western newspapers made much of his death, the Soviet media barely mentioned his disappearance. In the end, Comrade Khrushchev paid dearly – once dead – for tarnishing the image of his predecessor and for shaking the Communist Empire with its feet of clay. Even in the name of truth and human rights.

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It is difficult not to think of the fate reserved for this former Secretary of the Communist Party when learning that the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is dead.

In the West, Gorbachev has long drawn crowds and accolades for ending the Cold War. For stopping the mad race for nuclear armaments. (Even today, in this regard, despite renewed nuclear threats from the Kremlin, we still owe you a debt of gratitude, Mikhail Sergeyevich!)

However, in his own country, Russia, he is one of the most reviled leaders of the public. In fact, in the club of unpopular historical figures, only Boris Yeltsin is more hated than “Gorbi”.

According to a major Pew Institute poll conducted in 2017, only 22% of Russians believe that Mikhail Gorbachev played a “positive role” in history. And Stalin, the man responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens? The Georgian, who is seen as the great winner of the Second World War, received at the time an approval rating of 57% from Russians. Today, that popularity has jumped to 75%.

In the eyes of the vast majority of Russians today, the last president of the USSR is the one who not only shook the Red Empire, but also witnessed its dismemberment without trying to stop its fall.

Some even see him as a traitor who signed a superpower death warrant for the benefit of the United States and NATO members. At best, a naive man who thought he was capable of great reforms – perestroika and glasnost – but saw them turn against him and against Russia.

There are, of course, Russian voices speaking out against this implacable people’s tribunal. There is in particular that of the documentary maker Vitaly Mansky. In Gorbachev. Heaven, a river film released in 2021, the filmmaker allowed the last Soviet leader to explain himself, to come back to important chapters of history, his own and that of his country. “Mikhail Gorbachev is the only Russian leader who believed that the interest of the person was more important than that of the State, or at least who stated this principle, the filmmaker told me during an interview in Montreal. last fall. I am 1000% certain that his historical legacy will one day be restored. Russia will continue to change. There will be progress. It may take time, maybe 100 years, but it will come,” he told me, a few months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Gorbachev we discover in Vitaly Mansky’s documentary is anything but a smiling old man ending his life in fullness, proud of his accomplishments.

We observe a politician kept aside, in a golden case, by the current occupant of the Kremlin. We see a sick man, physically diminished, but able to quote Pushkin or Dostoyevsky more easily than others enumerate their grocery list. We meet a pugnacious, angry, master of dodging, but capable of the most tender emotions when he thinks of his wife Raïssa, his companion for 40 years. Since the death of the latter in 1999, Mikhail Gorbachev, by his own admission, lived a truncated life, without taste.

It is therefore with the love of his life that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev will now rest. In the Novodevichy cemetery.

Alongside his Raissa, but not far from Nikita Khrushchev.

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