Could Mikhail Gorbachev Have Saved the Soviet Union?
The Soviet leader is remembered as the man who killed a superpower. But Gorbachev’s gambit on reforms could have worked -- if only he wasn't betrayed by the Communist Party.
DECEMBER 21, 2016
Amid the thousands of protesters who assembled on China’s Tiananmen Square inMay 1989, just weeks before the Chinese government sent troops to crush the demonstrations, one person held a placard that declared: “We Salute the Ambassador of Democracy.” The envoy that this protester saluted was neither an activist nor a dissident nor from a country renowned for human rights advocacy. It was Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who had arrived in Beijing on May 15, 1989, two weeks before the Chinese leadership’s fateful decision to send in troops. The type of democracy he offered was not Western-style liberal capitalism but market socialism. Chinese students took trains from far-flung provinces just to see him. Gorbachev inspired China’s protesters on Tiananmen Square because the Soviet leader’s struggle to refashion the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy and authoritarian political system mirrored their efforts in China. Reformers in both countries, protesters believed, were fighting similar battles.
