Great Janus

When (in the year, it seems, in the eighty-sixth) he spoke about the priority of universal human values, many thought that they had misheard.
Today, the most patented cannibals have got the hang of talking about these values ​​- Russians under thirty and cannot imagine any other rhetoric! But we, whose memory keeps Suslov's inquisitorial profile, and whose skin remembers the dictatorship of the proletariat, are aware of what a tectonic fault Gorbachev's words meant.
In essence, it was a miracle: the upright General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, who arose in the middle of this terrarium. A miracle, perhaps, is inevitable from the point of view of mother history, but what does history have to do with it when you live your only life! If the coin had fallen a little differently, they would have chosen Comrade Grishin, and the Khan: a couple more generations would have hooted, like a pretty one, into the same hole, following the fathers of the sixties and grandfathers-deviators ...
Gorbachev started with nonsense: with acceleration. Where else was there to accelerate? 9.81 meters per second squared was our acceleration! Acceleration of free fall… Of course, he had no idea what he was dealing with – I mean the country. „

He became a symbol of change, because these changes took place in himself.

” The country, however, also had no idea about itself. Terra incognita with pre-shot statistics and sociology, the USSR threw off the skates, never ceasing to be proud of iron smelting per capita.
It was necessary to go to the touch - and he decided.
In essence, Gorbachev just wanted to blow off steam, but his hands were blown off almost immediately, along with the valve. "Almost immediately" - on a historical scale, but what a path he managed to go along with the country in these six years!
In Gorbachev, a historical rumor and a human scale were revealed - how quickly he outgrew the secretary of the Central Committee, which he was until recently ...
If in 1983 Gorbachev had been allowed to read the transcript of his own speech in 1989, he would have shot himself so as not to get comrade Andropov alive. Ultimately, he became a symbol of change, because that change took place within himself.
It is difficult for anyone who has not seen these years to imagine how encouraging and how annoying he was! And all at once. Gorbachev is a traitor to the socialist homeland, Gorbachev is the main brake on perestroika… Two-faced Janus, without changing the stage, he appeared either as a brave democrat or as a mossy party member. He played on contradictions, offering himself as a golden mean, he skillfully blackmailed both sides with the freedom of his maneuver.
Today, from a distance, it is clear: he just flew like a surfer, balancing on the very crest of an unprecedented wave. From a certain moment the speed ceased to depend on it, it was the speed of the historical process! The only question was whether he would stay on the crest himself.
Considering the power and steepness of the wave, it must be admitted that it held on for a very long time.
A favorite of the West, his district committee origin ultimately let him down. "That's where the old man's curse!" - as it was sung in "Rigoletto" ...
Like Yeltsin later, Gorbachev began to roll back his own reforms and with his own hands brought to power those who had done away with him (fortunately, only in a political sense). Like Yeltsin, at the decisive moment, he preferred the loyal, quiet, faceless nomenklatura to the democratic element ...
Oh, this faithful, quiet, faceless nomenclature ...
But in measuring what Gorbachev accomplished, let's measure not from the liberal dream, but from the hopeless landscape in which he took over the country. And, remembering the free breath of August 1991, we will be surprised at the miracle.
And let's say thank you.