The most hated Russian

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

The whole (liberal) (Western) world worships him as the father of Perestroika, a person who hugely contributed for the fall of the Iron Curtain (Tear down that wall, Mr Gorbachev!)... But in Russia itself, Gorbachev is probably the most hated man. And is regularly a recipient of tons of verbal abuse. And no surprise, he's often erroneously declared dead. Just like the other day.

http://www.rferl.org/content/gorbachev-debunks-death-reports/25070017.html

The umpteenth rumor of his death began circulating a few days ago: in their German program, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti announced that Gorbachev had died. But it was soon found out that the info was actually false. "I'm alive and well, my blood pressure is 150/80, my blood sugar is normal", the former Soviet leader said. What's more, seems like 82-year old Gorbie had even worked a bit at his foundation that same day when he was supposed to have died, an aide of his clarified. "The information is a complete hoax, Gorbachev is nowhere near dying", his assistant told the reporters.

News of Gorbachev's supposed death have been getting more frequent these days, they're even a regular occurrence among the Russian press and/or blogosphere in the last year or so. In May 2012 a similar announcement even came out at the English version of Wikipedia, from where through the social networks and the media it quickly spread across the world. None of it was true.

Still, it's not surprising that people would believe this sort of stuff, since Gorbachev is far from being a healthy man these days. For the last few years he has undergone a series of heavy surgeries: his carotid artery, his prostate, and the spinal cord. Diabetes has also been causing him problems, which has brought him to hospital many times. But above all stands his negative image among his compatriots, which must be a heavy burden to live with.

So why do so many Russians hate him in their guts, really? Gorbachev himself has been asked of this. He once famously responded that "They'd probably stop hating me only after I'm dead". But then after some contemplation he added, "Nah, actually I don't think they hate me at all".

He was wrong, of course. Because, by the looks of most comments under the news articles announcing his supposed death, seems like a wave of hatred has been mixed with political disdain, outright lies and horrible insults. When the false announcement in question was published at the Mail.ru website, almost every second word in the comments was "traitor". And that gives a pretty clear idea what would be written on his obituary one day when he leaves this world for real. The word "great reformist" definitely will not be it. This sort of response also gives some hint about what would be written in the Russian history books about the Perestroika period - those 6 years of turbulent change in the USSR when Gorbachev tried to modernize his country, and arguably failed. Many Russians still refuse to forgive him that the Perestroika ultimately ended with the collapse of the Soviet empire. A great part of them genuinely believe that Gorbachev single-handedly and deliberately dismantled the Soviet Union, rather than the processes of internal degradation that had already been in place for quite a while. It's much easier to blame one single person, because that provides an opportunity to re-direct the focus and distract the attention from the real culprits, which may be much more faceless and hard to define than just pointing a finger at a single politician who happened to be at the right (wrong?) time and place.

Being true to the endemic Russian proneness to seek for all sorts of external foes and grand conspiracies, many people in Russia even believe he did all this by the bidding of the US secret services, the CIA, Soros, the Jewish Freemasons, the omnipotent Illuminati, or Saint-Lenin-knows-what-else.

"How do you live as a national traitor, being hated by the entire Russian people, huh?", one online user rhetorically asks, and expects no answer. Another wishes Gorbachev still many more long years of life - so he could "live to the day when the people would hold him accountable for his crimes against Russia". A third user says that Gorbachev is actually immortal, since even the Devil refuses to receive him in Hell, because he'd only bring Hell to ruin, the way he did with the USSR. They call Gorbie the Russian Judas, and some are declaring the future day of his death a day of national jubilation and festivity. Among the sea of abuse and hateful messages, one single piece of praise sticks out: "Bravo, Mikhail Sergeevich, well done for managing to bring down that hollow Soviet Union!" Followed by a ton of patriotic chest-thumping and accusations of treason against Mother Russia.

Sure, both the false announcements of Gorbie's demise and the thousands of scribblings around the blogosphere tend to sink into oblivion pretty fast. But it's not like they don't display the true state of the "broad Russian soul" in regards to one of their former leaders. They don't just hate him. They wish he never existed. Probably because by some whim of the circumstances he became the very personification of their own failures. By hating him, these people are implicitly acknowledging that they hate themselves, what their country had become and has been ever since the end of those days of lost glory. Some of his supporters say his detractors hate him because they never understood him, because he was a visionary that lived way ahead of his time. Even so, the fact is that the change he became a catalyst for, keeps causing a rift right through the middle of Russian society even today, two and a half decades after those turbulent events.

Comments

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Russian news agency 'Novosti' does NOT have it's German TV program.

PS. Gorbachev IS disliked, damned and hated but NOT that much to become No.1, imho.

PPS. 'Being true to the endemic Russian proneness'
Errrr... WHAT??

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

I expect a lot of hand-waving now, accompanied with "das ist bullshit, sonny" and the like.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Russian news agency 'Novosti' does NOT have it's German TV program.

Not only is there a German edition of the RIA Novosty, but they frequently report (http://de.rian.ru/opinion/20121114/264930615.html) about Gorbachev.

Do you disagree that Russians are prone to believing in conspiracy theories? Have you read politics_ru and ru_politics on LJ lately?

Oh wait. Look who I'm trying to reason with. Nevermind then.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Is there anything that anyone says about Russia which you do not consider to be bullshit?

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

'Being true to the endemic Russian proneness' Errrr... WHAT??

What - what. It's not like Russia, even at the topmost official level, hasn't resorted to outright conspiracy theories and citing external foes as the main culprit for its domestic woes, right?

Wasn't it Putin himself who accused Hillary Clinton (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-12-08/world/35287139_1_largest-opposition-protests-election-protests-election-results) of conspiring with the Russian opposition to destabilize his regime?

There's always someone else to blame for one's own shortcomings, isn't there?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Here in the US, they say that Elvis is dead. It remains to be seen. Elvis is alive and well and jumping from airplanes.

BTW, when Reagan died I told my students to have people pray for all those poor souls in Hell. Now that Reagan has arrived, the temperature has gone up a few degrees.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine the chaos that would have happened had the USSR collapsed under another hard-line reactionary, rather than what happened with Gorbachev. I wonder if the wars would be over by now.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

First, what exactly do you mean by saying 'another hardliner', may I ask you? Gorbachev wasn't one.
Next, the fact that it was HIM whom the collapse of USSR has to be attributed to, ruins the logic of your statement.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Imagine the Democratic Republic of the Congo with white people. That'd be the size of it.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I took a course in Soviet history a few years before the collapse of the USSR. The professor told a joke that he said was popular among scholars of the Soviet Union at the time:

The economy of the USSR is often compared to a train, and every now and again, the train gets stuck and will not move. A long time ago, Comrade Stalin was in charge of the train and it stopped moving. So Comrade Stalin said "Shoot the engineer! Shoot the conductor!" And after some frantic efforts by the new but poorly trained replacements, the train started to move again.

Comrade Khruschev was in charge of the train and the train stopped moving. So Comrade Khruschev said "Let's offer the engineer......a refridgerator." And after some intense negotiations, the train shuddered and started to move.

Comrade Brezhnev was in charge of the train and the train stopped moving. So Comrade Brezhnev said "Is anyone looking? Let's close all the curtains and PRETEND the train is moving."

So now Comrade Gorbachev is in charge of the train and the train is STILL not moving. So Comrade Gorbachev has said, "Okay. Let's open the curtains, open the windows and stick our heads outside so we can all say how much this railroad SUCKS."

By all accounts since then, it was that Gorbachev wanted to save as much of the Soviet system as he could by changing the parts of it that held it back and could not be sustained. In retrospect that was a taller order than anyone could have managed. We are better off without the Soviet Union, but perhaps Russia would have been better by a more thorough recognition that the USSR was a tyranny that needed far more than "saving".

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Of course your professor could've mentioned how most old Russian machines tend to be brought back into operation, once they've malfunctioned.

You hit 'em with your foot or bang on them with your fist. And they start working again. For a while.

Ps. How do I know? We used to have a Lada.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

By all accounts since then, it was that Gorbachev wanted to save as much of the Soviet system as he could by changing the parts of it that held it back and could not be sustained. In retrospect that was a taller order than anyone could have managed.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I remember when there were votes to break up the Soviet Union ( I think Yeltsin was really pushing hard for the CIS at that time?) and Gorbachev was forced to watch it happen in his official capacity, but he tried everything in his powers (Democratic powers I hasten to add) to stop it. He was pretty emotional about the entire thing naturally.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

It looks as if at the time when the resistance to the communist regimes was the strongest, they somehow managed to squash it and survive (the 50s and 60s). And just when the people of the Eastern bloc looked likely to give up and embrace the notion that they'd be ruled forever by communist regimes, the system suddenly collapsed. Wonder why?

It wasn't so much the actions of a diminishing number of dissidents that brought the system down, or the waning ideas of few relatively quiet civil rights activists from the late 80s. It was the very erosion of the system itself that brought the whole thing down, and the party elites were incapable of preventing that. The general population had already almost lost hope in their future at the time, and at the eve of the sudden changes even the party apparatchiks did not believe in the viability of the system any more. Some of them did manage to prepare themselves and shapeshift into a new form of political entities and continue ruling their countries for a time, but ultimately the system was doomed a long time before it actually came down. The threat of counter-revolution was no more. The external foe that had kept the regime united and tight, was slowly softening away. Ironically, the symbiotic relationship between the two great enemies that had kept them both at the edge of both their destruction and their mobilisation, had been transformed, the dynamics had changed and the more peaceful relation between themselves was the factor that exposed the disparities between themselves, and made the weaker one lose the game.

As soon as relations between the two sides of the Cold War began to somewhat normalise, and the access of the people from the eastern side of the curtain were no longer prevented from gaining access to insights and impressions about the other side, and started making some unpleasant comparisons... the system was no longer able to sustain itself. The regimes had already lost the last traces of legitimacy in the eyes of their own people.

The likes of Gorbachev and Walesa did facilitate this process, but they weren't the ones who caused it. They were those leaders that we talked (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1751026.html) about the other day, be it grassroots or from top-down, but they did happen to be in the right place at the right time. Or, the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on your perspective.

Apparently there are still lots of people who truly believe the past could've been sustained, but that's a delusion. Sure, it's understandable that they'd want all the previous greatness for their country, who wouldn't want that? But they have to live in the present and think for the future instead, because Russia still has a lot to offer to the world. But first it has to change. Otherwise it'd succumb to irrelevancy.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

> The general population had already almost lost hope in their future at the time

That is exactly when a people is most dangerous. When they've lost all hope.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

What we know now is that by the 1980's the USSR was in terminal decline.

But that was a well kept secret kept best from the Russians themselves.

The Gorby hatred is a artifact of the surprise everyone felt when we woke up one morning in 1990 and realized that it was all over. I remember it. I remember how astonished I was that, after all that, after all that death and destruction, all that murder and torture, poof! the Russian Bear was no more than a paper tiger. If I could be that relived, how much more so must many of Russians felt betrayed? Shamed? No wonder that they embrace "the stab in the back" as an explanation for Soviet failure. And who better to stab a Russian in the back than another Russian?

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I mostly remember it as a nice inevitability, less than a surprise. But I also remember 9/11 as a bad inevitability, and not a surprise either.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

This may be slightly off topic, but I recently learned this:

Russia Finally Declares Beer Alcohol, Not Foodstuff (2011) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/21/russia-declares-beer-alcohol_n_906297.html)

I don't know what to make of a society that until recently thought 9%ABV beer was a foodstuff.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

We could go on forever about stupid and weird pieces of legislation (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/02/17-ridiculous-laws-still_n_481379.html) that make no sense, and which presumably are supposed to define an entire society.

...Or maybe pieces of legislation that are not so hilarious (http://www.mediaite.com/online/mississippi-officially-ratifies-13th-amendment-banning-slavery-148-years-later/) after all. Banning slavery in 2013? Now that's a society I wouldn't know what to make of.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

I never found out... is it true that the mark on his head represents the world? :-)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Kinda looks like a map of Thailand. Or Mozambique. Or maybe Italy.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Have they been able to remove that wine stain from his head yet?

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

What! And destroy his individuality? Without that stain he'd be just another old man. Nooo waaay.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There's a certain bitter irony in Russian nationalists embracing the Soviet Union, where Russian nationalism was seen as just as much a threat to the Soviet regime as all the others. One wonders why they don't hate Boris Yeltsin more than Gorby, as Yeltsin did more to topple the regime than Gorbachev did. Then again nationalism has always been one of the most acceptable Big Lies people both tell themselves and swallow.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

Gorbachev is actually immortal, since even the Devil refuses to receive him in Hell, because he'd only bring Hell to ruin, the way he did with the USSR.

Pure gold!

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Because, by the looks of most comments under the news articles announcing his supposed death, seems like a wave of hatred has been mixed with political disdain, outright lies and horrible insults.

Can't most of this be explained as propaganda bots? Russian TV asking people on the street what they [should] think is one thing. What do people who no longer live in Russia have to say about Mr. Gorby?

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

By the looks of it, some don't have much to say, either. See above, there's at least one here.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

I think they want someone, anyone to blame. Gorby had his hand on the switch when it all went down, though he wasn't responsible for the decline, nor its instigator. That's been pretty well covered above.

It reminds me of the Rush lyric from "Heresy" (of course it does) which is actually about the fall of Communism. After decades of hatred and the fear of nukes and basement fallout shelters and the world on the brink of destruction... and then we're told it was all a mistake. The song asks: "who will pay" for "all those precious wasted years?" I don't think there's any one person to lay that blame on - the leaders of both sides were guilty in their own ways. But that doesn't make it less tempting to try to find a scapegoat, fruitless as it is.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Maybe they need someone to blame because Pootin tends to arrest the people that go after him

[vlad-pulov.livejournal.com]

We russians don't hate Gorbaty, but think he was a naive fool used by US in the cold war.
When he had been made a "Generalny Sekretar of the Central Commitee of Communist Party USSR" in the middle of 1980-th, he looked like a dumb person who didn't understand anything. I was a little boy then but remember that. Something like Bush II, maybe.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I did want to include this recent interview with Mr. Gorbachev where he talks about how close the United States and the Soviet Union came to an agreement at Reykjavik, Iceland and the complete dismantling of their nuclear forces, something that seemed unthinkable only 3 years previously. While Mr. Gorbachev laments how many nuclear warheads there still are, (at the height of the Cold War, the numbers were astronomical), he deserves a great deal of credit helping the world step back from the brink. This is such a great interview:

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

I've seen recountings (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2004/06/ron_and_mikhails_excellent_adventure.html) of the story which focus on Reagan but say essentially the same thing.

That the Soviet empire collapsed under its own weight when Reagan and Gorbechev were in power turned out to be a stroke of good fortune that I would not have predicted. To ask the stars to align enough that they could complete nuclear disarmament was too much luck to ask for.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Before local horse-haters interpret wrong again what I'm saying, I'd like to summarise:
Gorbactschew, I guess, is NOT the 'most hated Russian'.
Some folks hate Yeltsin.
About 5% hate Putin.
Some would put Mr. Dronov, the LJ CEO as No. 1.
Many may give this place to their mother-in-law.
Life is a damn complex subject, folks.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

No problem, thanks for your opinion and for the representative sample that you've collected for us.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

It's much easier to blame one single person, because that provides an opportunity to re-direct the focus and distract the attention from the real culprits, which may be much more faceless and hard to define than just pointing a finger at a single politician who happened to be at the right (wrong?) time and place.

Exactly.

Gorbachev was in power near to the time when the oil reserves in Lake Baikal could now longer be expanded. With no expansion of energy use, the choices about what to do became more dire, more direct.

People used to not working with their hands to guarantee food tomorrow, especially if those hands have to contact the dirt, get snippy about the past when the machines did the work.