Donald Trump promised to make America great again. Xi Jinping’s favorite slogan touts the “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese people. Vladimir Putin is driven by the same desperate desire to restore Russia’s greatness.
But how do you define a great country? Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week, had different ideas about this.
For Putin, national greatness is determined by territory, military might and the ability to intimidate or subjugate its neighbors. The Russian leader believes that his country has the right to be one of the world’s great powers. He believes that Russia was “robbed” when Ukraine became independent, and the key to restoring national power and greatness is reclaiming lost territories. The tragic decision to invade Ukraine was the culmination of this obsession.
For Gorbachev, national greatness was determined more by the dignity of ordinary citizens. In a 2001 interview with historian Daniel Yergin, he pointed out the Soviet Union’s failure to provide its citizens with basic necessities: “Imagine a country that flies into space, launches satellites, creates this kind of defense system… [Но] there is no toothpaste, no washing powder, no basic necessities. It was incredibly humiliating to work in such a government.”
The fact that ordinary Russians no longer have to put up with such hardships is largely a consequence of Gorbachev’s economic reforms, however half-hearted they may have been. Those who accuse him of destroying the functioning Soviet economy should remember this.
The former Soviet leader’s ideas about human dignity extended to freedom of speech. It was also “incredible and humiliating” that under the Soviet system, educated people had to live in a world of official lies, slogans and censorship. Gorbachev changed this by freeing the press and creative industries, freeing dissidents and allowing historical research to resume. Putin is returning Russia to Soviet-style repression—suppressing the last independent media, jailing the opposition, and making it a criminal offense to admit that Russia is at war.
It is important to note that Gorbachev’s vision of human dignity extended beyond Russia’s borders. The most important and fundamental decision he ever made was not to send Soviet tanks to Poland, Hungary or East Germany in 1989, when the democracy movement was blossoming there.
For a short time, the Russian leader became an international symbol of political freedom.
When Gorbachev visited East Berlin in October 1989, a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, crowds chanted “Gorby, help us.” When he visited Beijing in May, student protesters in Tiananmen Square hailed him as a hero – a leader who showed that autocracies can reform and do not have to kill demonstrators in the streets. That dream ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre a month later.
It is true that Gorbachev’s reactions were not always noble and nonviolent. He is bitterly remembered in the Baltic states for bringing in Soviet troops in 1991 in a failed attempt to crush the independence movement.
But as Putinists will be the first to point out, Gorbachev lacked the ruthlessness to continue fighting and killing until Moscow’s power was restored. Putin is determined not to repeat this “mistake,” and Ukraine is paying a terrible price as a result. When the real story of what happened during the Russian siege of Mariupol comes to light, a war crime of historic proportions could be revealed – many thousands of civilians were killed and buried in mass graves.
For Putin, massacres such as those in Mariupol are just a small thing compared to his historic mission to restore Russia’s greatness.
His early expectations of defeating Ukraine within days were dashed. But he brushed it off, comparing himself to Peter the Great, whose Great Northern War lasted more than 20 years before victory was finally achieved.
This is a revealing comparison. Peter the Great was a despot, distinguished by his absolute indifference to human sacrifice. Many thousands of people died during the construction of his new capital, St. Petersburg. Peter also introduced compulsory conscription to fuel his wars. This is a step that Putin is not yet willing to take. For all his royal ambitions, he probably understands the danger of treating 21st-century citizens like 18th-century serfs.
Putin may believe that victories on the battlefield and territorial conquests are the only surefire ways to restore national greatness. But what the US Declaration of Independence called “respect for the opinions of mankind” should also matter. Warlike Russia is not doing well in this regard. An international poll conducted last year by the University of Pennsylvania and others found that the world’s three most admired countries were Canada, Japan and Germany.
All three countries scored highly on indicators such as honest government, human rights and social justice. These are things that mean little in Putin’s Russia, but are taken seriously by people and authorities who care about human dignity.
Putin demonstrated his contempt for these values—the values that Gorbachev promoted—by declaring that he was too busy to attend his funeral. Thousands of Russians passing by Gorbachev’s open coffin quietly expressed their disagreement.