Do we like them?

Do we like Mikhail Gorbachev?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Big real good (peaceful exit, opening up the USSR, green work) set against deadly force on his watch and his later backing of the Crimea annexation.

Mikhail Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 into a peasant family in Stavropol, southern Russia. He earned a law degree at Moscow University in 1950, ran the party in Stavropol by 1970, joined the Politburo in 1980, and became Communist Party general secretary in 1985. Then he launched perestroika and glasnost, restructuring and openness.

The reforms were real. He gave factory directors more power and allowed cooperatives, which became early incubators for private enterprise, and glasnost opened up Soviet historical secrets and broadened political debate. He won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on East-West reconciliation, including with Ronald Reagan. Even Alexei Navalny praised his willingness to leave power peacefully.

Then the messy bit. In January 1990 a 35,000-strong army corps was sent into Baku on the command of the Soviet leadership, with reports of 137 civilian deaths. Azerbaijan's first president, Ayaz Mutalibov, said “The blame for the tragic events lies, in particular, with Gorbachev”. In Vilnius in January 1991, relatives of four people killed at the TV tower sued him in 2022, alleging he knew what the military was doing and failed to stop it. He consistently denied ordering the killings and argued in his memoirs the attack was planned without his knowledge. The court dropped the case when he died, so nothing was ever proven against him.

On the harm test, we found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people or women either way, and that's the honest gap. On Ukraine, he told The Sunday Times in 2016 that he supported Putin's Crimea decision and would have done the same, and Ukraine banned him from entering for five years over it. After Russia's full invasion in 2022, his foundation called for an early end to hostilities and peace talks.

Nothing new on him lately. He died on 30 August 2022, and Russia was split on it. Putin called him a statesman who made an enormous impact on world history, Putin's spokesman Peskov criticised his supposed naivety toward the West, and Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said his rule brought “absolute sadness, misfortune and problems”. State honours looked unlikely.

So where does that leave us? He chose not to use the army to keep an empire together and he handed over power peacefully, which is rare. Against that, force was used in Baku and Vilnius while he led, and he lent his name to the Crimea annexation later. Where you land depends on whether you weigh what he allowed to happen or what he refused to do.