October 6
GUEST: Jeffrey Sommers, Professor of Political Economy & Public Policy in Global Studies and a Senior Fellow, Institute of World Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, talks about how Gorbachev became the most reviled man in Russia.
How Gorbachev became the most reviled man in Russia
Gorbachev is one of the most interesting figures to come out of the Cold War. A brilliant and hard working idealist, he was both a Communist and and a champion of his people. In fact, he displayed a moral compass that most international leaders have jettisoned long ago. Did that make him unfit for the realpolitik that he faced as the head of the Soviet Union?
Perhaps his biggest failure was to believe that the United States wanted to spread democracy and free speech to his country. He was conned into giving up his power and dismantling his country for a few verbal agreements that the US had no intention of following through on. He was a country boy, a rube to the imperial powers that wanted to make Russia a neoliberal colony. Gorbachev's failure was the end of Soviet power, for good or for evil.
But the warning remains. The US in its present form is a highly aggressive military machine, interested in corporate power and the domination of the rest of the world. With our hundreds of military bases and our hundreds of billions spent on weaponry every year, we are the behemoth that Gorbachev should have been worrying about. In fact, the US has become the global empire that Americans have always been taught to fear in foreign nations. Studying Gorbachev's life is to learn about these United States.
