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Mikhail Gorbachev’s goal, according to his associates, was “socialism with a human face.” The belief that communism was reformable was what led him to risk introducing fundamental change. Soviet citizens were allowed to speak and demonstrate without fear of arrest, to open businesses and to travel abroad. Gorbachev put an end to the Cold War, renounced the Marxist idea of class struggle as the driving force of history, and refused to intervene to save communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
In the end, Gorbachev couldn’t save his own power or create democracy. He defeated totalitarianism but didn’t destroy it. He clung to socialist beliefs and fought to preserve the Soviet Union’s ideological structure. When he was removed on Dec. 25, 1991, and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, the moral and legal vacuum he left behind spawned a criminal oligarchic regime in Russia that used terror to stay in power and launched a full-scale war against Ukraine.
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