To Be Continued | English Version | The Gorbachev effect

Or when the fluttering of a few eyelashes in Moscow brought down an Iron Curtain. It was August 30, 2022 when the last president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mikhail Sergueievitch Gorbachev, died. Some people, instead of Gorbatchov, write and pronounce Gorbachev. The truth is that this is only one of the many peculiarities of a very particular man - and one who changed the world.

How do you say it in Russian - first things first: Gorbachev or Gorbatchov? "Gorbatchov, read Gorbatchof." When in doubt, we contacted an authority: Filipe Guerra, translator of Russian literature (in collaboration with Nina Guerra, he has more than 70 translated titles), work for which he has been awarded more than once. Therefore, we can confidently quietly, he is an expert in Russian. Now, why this duality in the way of pronouncing pronunciation, in Portugal and elsewhere, of the last surname of the last Soviet leader? transliteration: Горбачев. That Cyrillic '4' is 'tch' and makes the Cyrillic 'e' - which incidentally is yô, but which has not had an umlaut for two centuries - sounds like 'o' in Russian, and also in Portuguese, since it is a tonic syllable." The explanation is technical and Filipe Guerra gives another similar example, showing that the same happens in tchernii ("blacks"), "which is read tchórnii. If the syllable is not tonic the 'e' is read as 'e'." The tonic syllable in Russian makes a lot of difference. "These are peculiarities of Russian phonetics," says the expert, who has lived and worked in Moscow, before concluding, "On Russian television everyone says Gorbatchov." Having got this obstacle out of the way, let's devote ourselves to who Mikhail Gorbatchov was.

ORDER TO RESTRUCTURE

It may well be that perestroika is the main word to retain from Gorbatchov's legacy after his six years of leading the USSR. Perestroika means "reconstruction," but the way it was applied by Mikhail Gorbatchov to the economy of the Soviet Union eventually lent it the meaning of "restructuring." In practice, perestroika led to the opening of the Soviet market to the outside world and the liberalization of the domestic market. The immediate consequences were disastrous, at least in the economic field, which led, or at least substantially contributed, to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the invisible barrier that separated the communist countries that were signatories of the Warsaw Pact from the other so-called Western countries, almost all of which belonged to NATO or, at the very least, aligned with it. This eventually led to the fall of the dictatorial socialist and communist systems in most countries aligned with the Soviet Union and, after its dissolution, to the independence of several republics, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, among others.

HUMBLE ORIGINS AND RAPID RISE

Mikhail Sergueievitch Gorbatchov was born into a peasant family on March 2, 1931, in the small town of Privolnoye in the kray (main administrative region) of Stavropol in southwestern Russia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Agriculture being the family's main activity, it is not surprising that Gorbatchov himself started very early in these pursuits. When he joined the Komsomol, the youth of the Party - the Party is the Communist Party - the future leader was working as a mechanical harvester operator in the fields of Privolnoye. His performance in the Komsomol, however, made him noticed: in 1952, at the age of 21, he went to study law at Moscow State University. It was then that he joined the Party. When he finished his degree, in 1955, he held several positions, both in the Komsomol and in the Party itself, in the Stavropol divisions. His rise was rapid: in 1970 he became a member of the Party's Regional Committee. In 1971 Gorbatchov became a member of the Party Central Committee, and in 1978 he became Secretary of Agriculture. The following year he became a candidate for membership in the Politburo - the highest body within the Central Committee - becoming a full member in 1980. Gorbachev's steady and rapid rise - when he became Party General Secretary in 1985, he was still the youngest member of the Politburo - was due in large part to his being a sort of "dauphin," as they say in politics, to Mikhail Suslov, the Party's ideological leader. During Yury Andropov's leadership (1982-84), Gorbatchov was one of the most active members of the Politburo, which guaranteed him visibility and made him one of the likely successors of the General Secretary who followed, Konstantin Chernenko, to whom Gorbatchov was also close. Chernenko's leadership would last little more than a year: the General Secretary took office in February 1984 and died in March 1985. The predictions were then confirmed: the Politburo elected Mikhail Gorbatchov general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The rest is history - a history that came to an end on August 30, 2022, with the death of one of the most remarkable world leaders of the second half of the 20th century: Gorbatchov was, for better or worse, the man who opened the Communist East to the Western world's way of life. 

Translated from the original on The Butterfly Effect issue from Vogue Portugal, published October 2022.Full story and credits on the print issue.