CANBERRA, August 31. /TASS/. The first and only President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev created a unique model of defusing tensions between the East and the West, which gave hope for a better future, and he is not to blame that the Western elite took advantage of his generosity, says Tony Kevin, Australian international relations expert, who served as a diplomat at the Australian embassy in Moscow during Gorbachev’s rise to power.
"To rise to the top of the Soviet political system from relatively humble beginnings in small-town southern Russia, as Mikhail Gorbachev did, required three elements: great personal strengths of intelligence, ambition and willpower; supreme self-belief in one’s own leadership ability and in one’s ability to convince others of this; and the essential third element of good luck. For most of his Soviet political career, Gorbachev rode the wave of success, drawing on all three attributes," he told TASS. "Gorbachev’s supreme self-confidence and his belief in the strength of the Soviet system he headed - qualities which had brought him to the top in 1985 - proved inadequate to the challenges facing him in the next five years, when the third essential element - luck - ran out on him."
According to the expert, Gorbachev underestimated the threat represented by his political rival Boris Yeltsin (who became the first President of the Russian Federation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union), as well as "Western malevolence."
"He really came to believe that Reagan’s United States was his friend," Kevin said. "Gorbachev never really understood how [Henry] Kissinger (in the Nixon years 1973-77) and [Zbigniew] Brzezinski (in the subsequent Carter years 1977-81) had been architects of a consistent bipartisan Washington elite policy of exploiting detente to weaken the Soviet Union."
According to the Australian diplomat, although many Russians "will not easily forgive Gorbachev for his fatal mistakes in his years in power," one must admit that he sowed the seeds that "have flourished in the new Russia."
"He also presented to Russians a model of East-West detente that, for all its risks and dangers that we now better understand, held out hopes of a better more harmonious future for both East and West. It is not his fault that the Western power elite exploited his generosity of spirit," Kevin said. "It is a pity that Gorbachev never had President [Vladimir] Putin’s political shrewdness and understanding of the powerful forces arrayed against the Russian world, then and now."
Kevin is an Australian expert specializing in international politics. He started his diplomatic career in 1969 in Moscow; later, he served as an ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. Later, he focused on international political expertise and wrote several books, including the "Return to Moscow" (2017), dedicated to his stay in Russia. In the book, he documented Gorbachev’s rise to power and the circumstances that led to his resignation.