Today’s Guest Column
Given the recent troubles in Ukraine, in particular the downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukrainian territory by pro-Russian dissidents, one might go way back and ask, assuming the U.S. had any influence in the matter, why America seemed to favor Boris Yeltsin over Mikhail Gorbachev when it came to a showdown over who was going to run Russia and/or the former Soviet Union? After all, it was Yeltsin who gave us Vladimir Putin, his hand-picked successor. Would Gorbachev have done as badly, or even worse? I think not.
Oh sure, I know there was the technicality that they both controlled or were the leaders of separate entities — Gorbachev of the Soviet Union — which contained Russia, and Yeltsin of just Russia.
And when the Soviet Union presumably dissolved, Gorbachev was without a country or an empire and Yeltsin was still the presumed legitimate leader of Russia or was soon to become such. But couldn’t there have been a way to keep Gorbachev as leader of the new independent state of Russia?
Or barring that, maybe keeping the Soviet Union intact with Gorbachev still in there, though still evil, might have been the lesser of two evils. Breaking up the Soviet Union, if possible, had been a good idea in the 1940s before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, but was it such a good idea in the ’90s when there was such a danger of their nuclear weapons falling into terrorists’ hands? Things seemed to work out all right in that regard, but nonetheless, the danger was still real at the time.
Morally, keeping the Soviet Union intact and helmed by Gorbachev, who seemed to be a real reformer — probably more so than Yeltsin — might have been better for most of the other republics resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union, most of which ended up being saddled with homegrown despots anyway, who formerly had been communist bosses and opportunists ready to change their stripes.
As a corollary to all this: Though it might have been a good idea to arm the Afghans in the ‘80s so they could drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, it might not have been such a good idea, after the Soviet army was gone, to continue this support for also throwing out the native communist government in Afghanistan, even though that government was still receiving support from the Soviets. After all, this just made it that much easier for Arab terrorists to take more complete control of the Afghan rebellion.
I could be wrong about all this — there were still many unanswered questions about Gorbachev — but, admittedly superficially, it seems as though he would have been a better leader and more sincere reformer than Yeltsin, whether of the Russian Republic or of a continuing and still functioning Soviet Union. At least it is something to think seriously about.
Jonathan Miller is a graduate student studying geography. He can be reached at jsmiller@umd.edu.
