People Who Died (3 Viewers)

A great, brave man

RIP
great man for an interview was Mikhail.
considering the amount of power he had, Gorbachev always came across as ''a daycent man".

terrible to see his legacy of making the world a much safer place was never built on and was utterly squandered by many fools. He must have died bitterly disappointed.

NATO and the West lied to Gorbachev and were triumphalist about the USSR's demise which caused problems ever since.

I spelled checked 'triumphalist' and 'cold war triumphalism' came up on google.
 
Attila the Stockbroker's thoughts on Gorbachev.

Strange that I mentioned my ambiguous feelings surrounding Gorbachev’s legacy in a piece only yesterday, just before the news broke that he had died. Here are my promised further thoughts: on the long train journey from Vienna to Brussels I have plenty of time for them.
As someone who spent a fair amount of time visiting and performing in mid to late Eighties GDR, I was in an ideal place to see the impact Gorbachev’s determination to bring ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’
(reconstruction) to the fossilised bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had in a country where ‘von der Sowjetunion lernen ist siegen lernen’ (‘learning from the Soviet Union is learning to win’) was, until Gorbachev’s reforms, a key slogan of the ruling SED.
The progressive youth I met everywhere loved what he stood for: quite literally, socialism with a human face. The elderly party hierarchy hated him: he was a threat to their long-established, entrenched and needlessly dictatorial way of doing things and repeating that once-hallowed slogan became suspect. As 1987 turned into 88 and 89, however, the young, progressive, pro-democratic socialist elements started to gain the upper hand. We all knew change was coming, but no one suspected how quickly it would come - and how simultaneously (and superficially) politically liberating and, crucially, economically devastating it would be.
The point about Gorbachev - one which right wing media will ignore or deny as they laud him for ‘ending the cold war’ and ‘freeing Eastern Europe’ is that he, like us, wanted to democratise socialism. ‘Glasnost i perestroika’ meant ‘openness and reconstruction’ - of the existing socialist system. Not its destruction and the establishment of extreme cronyist vulture capitalism, which is what happened in Russia as his reforms were hijacked by the unspeakable Yeltsin, the economic fruits of 70 years of Soviet rule were trousered by a few gangsters, and the vast majority of Russians thrown into abject poverty.
And what happened in the GDR, where the brave cohorts of the Left who brought down the wall were swamped by Kohl’s Bild-brainwashed, banana-waving dupes - soon to be unemployed, impoverished, and in many cases made homeless as the merciless, privatising Treuhandanstalt destroyed the lives of millions and the ‘Ellbogengesellschaft’ (elbow society) took hold. My song, ‘Marktsektor One’, written about a year after the Wall came down and covered by two East German bands, strikes a huge chord to this day. Google it if you like.
This whole story highlights a basic tenet of my political thinking. In the west, the word ‘democracy’ is always used in an exclusively political sense, which is completely ludicrous.
Without economic democracy, political democracy is just a clever safety valve for the most brutal forms of capitalism. Being able to say what you like isn’t much good if you are homeless, freezing, and starving.
In the Western way of thinking a society that lets people go on the streets and demonstrate against the fact that they are freezing and starving is deemed more ‘democratic’ than one where no one freezes or starves and the people who shout that they want to bring about a system where they do are locked up. That’s completely wrong. Neither are democratic.
Gorbachev understood that.
He got halfway towards what we all wanted - economic and political democracy - and then let the latter override the former. He should have silenced Yeltsin and the would-be oligarchs and kept political control over his economic reforms. If he had done that, Eastern Europe would now be socially democratic in the best sense of the word, not a plastic gangsters’ paradise - or in the case of Hungary and Poland, worse.
I have spent years recounting my memories of those heady days in the GDR where real democratic socialism was, for a short time, within reach. Those feelings came flooding back to me when Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party. Both inspired the young, both had brilliant ideas, both made fatal errors and terrible misjudgements - and both were stabbed in the back by people who were supposed to be on their own side.
RIP Gorby. In the GDR we thought you were the Messiah. You weren’t. You weren’t a very naughty boy either, just a good socialist who trusted your supposed ‘comrades’ too much.
 
Lads, he saw that the Soviet Union was a shitshow based on lies and repression
He could have played along and just kept the whole thing going, but he was better than that

He tried to change it for the better and the floodgates broke

It couldn’t stay as it was
What has come since we can hang on the people in charge since

The Soviet Union is nothing to be wistful for; they wholesale murdered their own people and imprisoned anyone who spoke up
And kept whole countries under lock and key
It was vile

As our man in Latvia says, only the loonies miss it
 
Wes Freed

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