on 8 December Yeltsin and the leaders of the
Ukraine came to an evidently hurried decision
to make a complete break with the past and to
create a new association, the Commonwealth of
Independent States, around the Slavic core of the
three republics (the third was Belorussia). They
were joined by Kazakhstan, by the four other
Asian republics and then by three more republics.
As 1992 began, the eleven members of this new
Commonwealth still had many problems to sort
out, among them the control of nuclear missiles,
the future division of military and naval units and
what unified structures should remain, their eco-
nomic relationships and unresolved territorial
questions. The most critical issues concerned the
Ukraine and Russia, whose presidents had to sort
out the futures of the Crimea and of the Black Sea
fleet, the transfer of nuclear weapons to Russia and
trade between the two republics. The death of the
Soviet Union solved a number of old problems,
but it also raised many new ones.
On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev resigned,
having to the last attempted to preserve the Soviet
Union. His enormous achievements had been
rightly acknowledged with the Nobel Peace Prize.
His belief in a humane socialism was sincere, and
he knew that without legality in a state there
could be no humanity. During his years of power,
the Gulags were liquidated, political prisoners
were set free and civil rights and freedoms were
returned to the Soviet peoples. His refusal to
protect the communist bosses in the former satel-
lites or to use the Red Army to quell popular
unrest brought freedom to East Germans, Czechs
and Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians and
Romanians. With the freedom came new prob-
lems, in part the inheritance of decades of com-
munist misrule. But the nightmare of a nuclear
holocaust receded as the Cold War came to an
end.
All this was accomplished by one extraordinary
man, himself the product of a communist upbring-
ing and of a communist system, to which he
remained loyal to the end. He attracted able men
to support him in his policies and created a mass
following in the Soviet Union. At first suspiciously
but later with matching openness, the West
responded. It was Gorbachev who did most to ini-
tiate the biggest change in global relationships
since the Second World War. For this alone he will
go down as one of the great leaders of the twenti-
eth century, his a crucial role in shaping its history.We can also begin to understand the reasons for
Gorbachev’s failures, for they too are embedded
in his concept of ‘humane democratic socialism’.
He chose the opposite course to the Chinese
reformers of the 1980s. Gorbachev’s priority was
the reform of the party, to open the party to
democratic influences and competition, which
would revive the Soviet economy as the burdens
of war and bureaucracy were lifted from the
shoulders of the Soviet peoples. The expanded,
though still small, private sector of the economy,
which had always existed even under Stalin,
would be allowed to compete with the revived
state sector to increase efficiency without threat-
ening to overtake the socialist economy. But
Gorbachev always saw that the most urgent need
was for political reform, which he believed would
lead to economic improvement.
Six years from March 1985 were not such a
long time to bring about a root-and-branch
change in party and government after more than
sixty years of communist autocracy, whose basic
assumptions had never been challenged by
Khrushchev or any of his successors. Gorbachev’s
thinking was revolutionary and opened up the
possibility of a better future for the Soviet Union.
Neither he nor most of his contemporaries inside
and outside the Soviet Union foresaw where these
policies were leading, even while they could not
fail to notice the increasing hardships placed on
the Soviet peoples during the years of political
transition. Gorbachev was blamed by Yeltsin and
his supporters, as well as by some economists in
the West, for not simultaneouslypursuing radical
economic market reforms as well. Significant
Western credit was denied because of their
absence. But Gorbachev feared they would have
led to anarchy and chaos. Nowhere in the world
have bothdrastic political and economic change
been attempted successfully at one and the same
time. During the 1980s Deng and the Chinese
reformers pursued economic reform while main-
taining communist political power largely intact.