‘As the world observed International Day of the Disappeared last August 30, public opinion is only starting to review the life of the last Soviet leader who had ended the Cold War and won a Nobel Peace Prize…’
AS the Armed Forces of the Philippines ended its 30-day mourning period for the death of former AFP chief, former defense secretary and former President Fidel Ramos, the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev passed away. His legacy:
- “Preparing for my address, I found in an old Russian encyclopedia a definition of ‘peace’ as a ‘commune’ — the traditional cell of Russian peasant life. I saw in that definition the people’s profound understanding of peace as harmony, concord, mutual help, and cooperation… But a modern state has to be worthy of solidarity, in other words, it should pursue, in both domestic and international affairs, policies that bring together the interests of its people and those of the world community. This task, however obvious, is not a simple one. Life is much richer and more complex than even the most perfect plans to make it better. It ultimately takes vengeance for attempts to impose abstract schemes, even with the best of intentions. Perestroika has made us understand this about our past, and the actual experience of recent years has taught us to reckon with the most general laws of civilization.”
[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1990/gorbachev/lecture/]
- “We had information back then that there were people in the West, including in governing circles, who rubbed their hands when they saw our difficulties…They did not conceal their joy after the dissolution of the Union. But first of all, we and not the West are responsible for our country… new relations with the West, including personal relations with Western leaders, were needed. It would have been impossible to end the Cold War, the arms race, and to resolve regional conflicts raging in the world. We then started to interact on global issues, such as ecology, energy and so on, as well. This is as relevant as ever today. Only together can we cope with the pandemic and the climate problem.” [https://www.gorby.ru/en/presscenter/news/show_30307/]
- “The era of Gorbachev is the era of perestroika, the era of hope, the era of our entry into a missile-free world…but there was one miscalculation: we did not know our country well,” said Vladimir Shevchenko, who headed Gorbachev’s protocol office when he was Soviet leader. “Our union fell apart, that was a tragedy and his tragedy,” RIA news agency cited him as saying… Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turbulence that his reforms unleashed, considering the subsequent plunge in their living standards too high a price to pay for democracy…”He gave us all freedom — but we don’t know what to do with it,” liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet Zvezda after visiting Gorbachev in hospital in June. [https://www.reuters.com/world/mikhail-gorbachev-who-ended-cold-war-dies-aged-92-agencies-2022-08-30/]
As the world observed International Day of the Disappeared last August 30, public opinion is only starting to review the life of the last Soviet leader who had ended the Cold War and won a Nobel Peace Prize “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations: In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell… Gorbachev grew up under Stalin’s regime, and experienced German occupation in World War II. After the war, he studied law in Moscow and pursued a career in the Communist Party. Journeys abroad gradually made him critical of the inefficient Soviet system, which came under further strain when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In 1985 Gorbachev was elected the new leader of the Soviet Union. He sought to reform communism, and introduced the concepts ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (change). Society was liberalized, and Gorbachev sought détente with the USA so as to be able to transfer funding from defense to civil society. He declared that he would not support Communist regimes in other countries if their peoples were opposed to them. He thus started a chain reaction which led to the fall of communism in Europe.”
[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1990/gorbachev/lecture/]
As another invasive species native to China (Pelodiscus sinesis, more commonly known as Chinese soft-shell turtle) is turning up in Philippine waters (https://ph.news.yahoo.com/invasive-species-native-china-found-philippines-063738953.html), historians and other social scientists re-read the transcript of the May 16, 1989 meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping: “History cannot be re-written; it cannot be remade anew. If we took the road of restoring past borders on the basis of how things were in the past, which people lived on which territory, then, in essence, we’d have to re-draw the entire world. This would lead to a world-wide scuffle. The principle of the inviolability of borders gives stability to the world [and] saves it. We base ourselves on the realities.” [https://unica.it/static/resources/cms/documents/MeetingGorbachevandDengMAY1989.pdf]
This was the 1989 Communist Summit in Beijing: “Although committed Communists almost their entire lives, both men broke sharply with past orthodoxy in their reform programs to emphasize realism and pragmatism in searching for solutions to their countries’ problems.
Both have urged their countrymen to ‘emancipate your thinking’ and ‘seek truth from facts,’ in two of Deng’s favorite phrases — or as Gorbachev put it recently, ‘abandon conservatism, abandon dogmatism and forge ahead’.” [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-05-15-mn-141-story.html]
As Filipinos wistfully grapple with the Marcos-Aquino dynastic debate and the US-China trade war, the death of Gorbachev brings us back to the Soviet leader’s December 7, 1988 speech to the United Nations: “The inheritance of inertia of the past are continuing to operate. Profound contradictions and the roots of many conflicts have not disappeared. The fundamental fact remains that the formation of the peaceful period will take place in conditions of the existence and rivalry of various socioeconomic and political systems. However, the meaning of our international efforts, and one of the key tenets of the new thinking, is precisely to impart to this rivalry the quality of sensible competition in conditions of respect for freedom of choice and a balance of interests.”
