The Media’s Misleading Labels for Soviet Dictator Mikhail Gorbachev

The professional media has long referred to dictators by their official titles, including even the self-given titles of autocrats, and including those who seized power by force. They refer to “President” so-and-so, and the like, no matter how repressive or tyrannical he is, despite not being subject to free and fair elections, and they continue to use such labels even after the authoritarian is deposed or dies. These titles are misleading because they equate authoritarians with heads of governments that are representative and free, which legitimizes dictators. For years, after referring to the last dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union), Mikhail Gorbachev, as “President” and “leader,” I expected the professional media, as well as many politicians and political commentators to do the same after he died, which they did last week. The liberal media particularly has long been enamored with Gorbachev, as have many liberal politicians and commentators. Bill Clinton, for example, regarded the Soviet dictator as his political hero. But Gorbachev, whose hero was the first Soviet tyrant, Vladimir Lenin, was doing nothing other than following Lenin’s advice that it was sometimes necessary to take a step back before taking two steps forward in advancing Marxist Communism. Gorbachev recognized that the Soviets could no longer compete militarily and economically with the United States and its allies and also recognized the foolishness of risking a nuclear war, for which he does deserve credit. He made reforms, not to weaken the Soviet Union, which was the unintended result, but out of the hope of strengthening it to make it more competitive. But the introduction of openness and political competition unleashed man’s irrepressible longing for freedom in the Communist Bloc, which led to his loss of power, the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and some other States, and ultimately to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Liberals misunderstood Gorbachev’s reforms as sincere, wishfully overlooking his hostility and tyranny. The last Soviet dictator continued the disinformation campaign against the West, kept political prisoners incarcerated and continued military campaigns for years in Afghanistan in support of the Afghan Communist dictatorship, among many examples, before his later concessions and the treaty he signed with U.S. President Ronald Reagan to eliminate intermediate range nuclear weapons. But what is most disturbing is how his liberal admirers praise Gorbachev for supposedly being tolerant of peaceful protests in the Eastern Bloc, while ignoring that he had reacted with deadly violence against peaceful protestors in the Baltic States calling for independence from the Soviet Union, which had invaded and conquered them under Josef Stalin during the Second World War. That he later recognized that more bloodshed would have been counterproductive and damaging to his and the Soviet image and that holding onto the Baltic States was untenable does not deserve nearly as much credit as he is given, as if he had some better vision for the world and had rejected Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Soviet Empire, which he did not. Gorbachev should instead be judged more accurately, giving him both the credit and blame he deserves, like everyone else. Furthermore, the excessive praise of him diminishes proper understanding of the “Evil Empire,” as Reagan put it and feeds the Soviet nostalgia that is one of the political pillars of current Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, who seeks to restore the Soviet Union. Instead, the Soviet Union should rightly remain, as Reagan predicted, on the “ash heap of history.”