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Save Our Earth<\/em>, the Berlin Wall, (c) 2022 Planet Earth Foundation<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Updated: 9.3.22<\/p>\n Today, the funeral of\u00a0Mikhail S. Gorbachev was held in Moscow.<\/p>\n Vladimir Putin, who is trying to undo what Gorbachev accompished, did not attend.<\/p>\n When we heard of Gorbachev’s passing on August 30, our thoughts went to our recent work in Berlin, and the impossible to describe experience of witnessing the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n It was never going to come down. The Cold War was never going to end. The nuclear obliteration of the planet was always going to be likely.<\/p>\n Then on a miraculous day in November 1989, the Wall came down. The Cold War ended. The risk of nuclear war was transformed into the real possibility of nuclear disarmament.<\/p>\n Immediately after, in what is now called the East Side Gallery, the Wall was transformed into the largest outside art gallery on the planet.<\/p>\n Looking at it sears the soul with all the hopes and fears of all the years.<\/p>\n Save Our Earth<\/em> reads one of the works of art on the Wall.<\/p>\n The world was transformed for a short time when everything seemed possible.<\/p>\n Then not, for all the reasons we’ve written thousands of words about.<\/p>\n But there is a very real chance life on earth wouldn’t be here and there would be no possibilities for the future without\u00a0Mikhail S. Gorbachev.<\/p>\n He made mistakes to be sure, including in some views late in life, but in the main, he was an agent of positive change and peace and freedom the likes of which was unimaginable at the time in the context of the Soviet Union–and unique in global impact given the weapons of mass destruction that could have been triggered at any moment.<\/p>\n He also represented a view in the context he was in, probably not realisitically possible at the time in the Soviet Union, that was both pragmatic and idealistic about combining communism and democracy, government management combined with a free market, that when viewed without labels, was an understanding that basic needs, basic rights and a reasonable distribution of resources without vast differences between haves and have nots is the only moral or sustainable course.<\/p>\n He wanted to steer the Soviet Union on a new course, not end it, but decades of totalitarian oppression by communist Russia in murdering millions of people, in forcing other nations into the union and controlling the nations of Eastern Europe and elsewhere led to the organic implosion of an utterly corrupt system.<\/p>\n Which led to another utterly corrupt system controlled by oligarchs and ultimately by a new dictatorship led by a former KGB agent who thought the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the highest order of historial tragedy. There were at first attempts to combine government planning and a free market economy with democracy before Putin took the reigns, but for many reasons it failed.<\/p>\n We will let the magnificent obituary by Marilyn Berger on the front page of \u00a0The New York Times tomorrow speak about the man\u00a0whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation<\/em>…Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time<\/em>.<\/p>\n Then we go to the opinion piece that will be published on September 1 in the Times by the man perhaps most qualified to comment,\u00a0Serge Schmemann, member of the editorial board, The Times former bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations and editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.<\/p>\n An excerpt:<\/p>\n The citizens of what was then West Germany, who lived in a divided country amid a huge arsenal, greeted Mr. Gorbachev\u2019s efforts to end the Cold War with a special passion. I remember crowds outside the baroque Old Town Hall in Bonn, then the West German capital, chanting<\/a> \u201cGorby! Gorby!\u201d while he signed the guest book inside. A public opinion poll on the eve of that visit in 1989 recorded<\/a> an astounding 90 percent of respondents answering \u201cyes\u201d when asked whether Mr. Gorbachev was a man they could trust.<\/em><\/p>\n There were cheers of \u201cGorby! Gorby!\u201d in East Berlin, too, when Mr. Gorbachev visited<\/a> in October 1989 to join its aging Communist leaders in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the East German state \u2014 a visit that directly precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall a month later. A popular myth in the United States credits Ronald Reagan with that historic event, but the forces that Mr. Gorbachev unleashed throughout East Europe were immeasurably more important.<\/em><\/p>\n The\u00a0International Herald Tribune deserves special mention. Anyone who has ever travelled internationally up until 2013 saw the “Trib” as informational water in the desert. It was available worldwide and in a few pages brought the news of the US and the world to everyone. It was unique, one of the greatest papers in history, and ended up as a casualty of the digital age in which information is everywhere, but useful or fact-based information is more and more elusive. One of the many destructive aspects of our times is that the very generation born during the era leading up to and following the fall of the Berlin Wall knows little or nothing about it–or many other rudimentray historical facts.<\/p>\n And the generations before and since are losing touch with their own basic history as well.<\/p>\n We’ve written thousands of words about that as well. And will continue to.<\/p>\n Lastly here is today’s report from the BBC on\u00a0Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral and impact.<\/p>\n There are a few people as important in impact over the past century or more, but arguably no one more so.<\/p>\n Read about his history, your history, our history, the world’s history:<\/p>\n “Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader, Is Dead at 91”<\/a><\/p>\n By <\/span>Marilyn Berger<\/span><\/p>\n Published Aug. 30, 2022<\/span>Updated Aug. 31, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n Leer en espa\u00f1ol<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.<\/em><\/p>\n Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.<\/p>\n His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia\u2019s state news agencies, citing the city\u2019s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified \u201clong and grave illness.\u201d<\/p>\n Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.<\/p>\n At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country\u2019s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not.<\/p>\n It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was \u201ca miracle,\u201d a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.<\/p>\n But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Mr. Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir V. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the \u201cgreatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.\u201d For Mr. Putin \u2014 and his fellow K.G.B. veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia \u2014 the end of the U.S.S.R. was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,\u201d Mr. Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n Mr. Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a \u201cspeedy cessation of hostilities.\u201d A friend of his, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview that Mr. Gorbachev was \u201cupset\u201d about the war, viewing it as having undermined \u201chis life\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. \u201cWe cannot live this way any longer,\u201d he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze<\/a>, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.<\/p>\n A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves \u2014 empty of just about everything but vodka.<\/p>\n The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West d\u00e9tente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.<\/p>\n The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Mr. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.<\/p>\n It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office<\/a>, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.<\/p>\n The openness Mr. Gorbachev sought \u2014 what came to be known as glasnost \u2014 and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the \u201cblank spots\u201d of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country\u2019s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him.<\/p>\n Still, Mr. Gorbachev\u2019s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:<\/p>\n \u25a0 He presided over an arms agreement<\/a> with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons, and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n \u25a0 He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan<\/a>, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.<\/p>\n \u25a0 While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n \u25a0 He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform<\/a> that in many places drove stunned Communist leaders out of office.<\/p>\n \u25a0 He oversaw an attack on corruption<\/a> in the upper reaches of the Communist Party, a purge that removed hundreds of bureaucrats from their posts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u25a0 He permitted the release of the confined dissident Andrei D. Sakharov<\/a>, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.<\/p>\n \u25a0 He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.<\/p>\n \u25a0 In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom-of-conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to \u201csatisfy their spiritual needs.\u201d<\/p>\n But if Mr. Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world \u2014 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990<\/a> \u2014 he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Mr. Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n After five years of Mr. Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Mr. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990<\/a>, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.<\/p>\n Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: \u201cWe see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n There was little in his early life that would have led anyone to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev could become such a dynamic leader. His official biography, issued after he became the new party chief, traced the well-traveled path of a good, loyal Communist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, a farming village in the Stavropol region of the Caucasus. His parents were genuine peasants, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. During his infancy, the forced collectivization of the land turned a once-fertile region into \u201ca famine disaster area,\u201d the exiled writer and biologist Zhores A. Medvedev<\/a> wrote in a biography of Mr. Gorbachev<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Mikhail](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2013\/01\/14\/obituaries\/20130114Gorbachev-AdvObit-slide-TSXA\/20130114Gorbachev-AdvObit-slide-TSXA-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nA Son of Peasants<\/h2>\n
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