Two years and two summits after Gorbachev’s coming to power, Reagan went to Berlin in 1987, giving rise to the quotation that will keep Gorbachev’s name alive longer than any of his own speeches: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Gorbachev did not tear it down. When the Germans tore down the wall themselves, free citizens and communist slaves meeting together, Gorbachev declined to order their massacre. He did not fire a single shot, and for that a grateful world remembers him.
Two factors fed the fevered western laudations which greeted Gorbachev during his tenure as General Secretary of the Communist Party: gratitude for an end to Soviet mass bloodletting and elite disdain for Reagan.
The diplomatic chancelleries — including in Washington — were aghast at Reagan’s speech at the Berlin Wall, as they had been aghast at his evil empire speech, and his opposition to central American communist proxies, and his deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe. The panjandrums of the press were similarly distressed. How could Reagan — to say nothing of John Paul II or Thatcher — be considered the colossus of communism’s collapse?
The solution was to credit the jailer for the jailbreak, for not shooting the prisoners as they fled the gulag. Time magazine, then still a significant title, led the way by declaring Gorbachev the “man of the decade” not just “man of the year.” The adulation was fulsome.
The comfortable western European pundits would rather die than admit that the decades-long arrangement of a dictatorial east and a powerful west was a wrong one and coming to an end.
Gorbachev might have been the jailer but western Europe was indifferent to the jailed.
It reacted to the fall of the Iron Curtain with confusion.
Western Europe would have to admit its apathy to the suffering in the Eastern Bloc and accept its subsequent inclusion into Europe proper.
The same snobs now have to admit that their indignation towards Russia while buying its gas is what will freeze them this winter.
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