Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Rest In Peace, Liberator

Gorbachev speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a news conference in Schleswig, Germany, in December 2004. Gorbachev would share criticism of Vladimir Putin, but he commended Russia's occupation and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, reportedly saying, "I would have done the same." However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Gorbachev's assessment of his successor reportedly took a sharp turn downward.

Cursed and admired in equal measure

he was a butterfly whose fluttering wings

changed the course of history not as he 

would have wished but through a heralded

series of measures to bring prosperity to a

nation cemented into a mould of humanity

that nature failed to endorse. Enthusiasm

to release his people from poverty and the

malaise of non-production he unwittingly

released the inexorability of defiance where

those held in state bondage to a failed ideal

knew flight to freedom was at last possible.

His imagined flight toward unleashing a vast

populace from stultifying rigidity failed

to account for human nature just as the

implementation of the locked-in ideology

he sought to humanize did. In the final analysis

a traitor to his tyranny-loving people who

regarded him with revulsion, denying his intent

reviling the result, preferring to remain in the

bonds of servitude to a new tyrant intent

on reinstalling vestiges of a lost power.



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