By Jeffrey Sachs
From the HUFF POST:
…I watched Gorbachev’s actions up close during this historic period. During 1989-91, I was a senior economic advisor to several post-communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe. In country after country, it was Gorbachev himself who told his communist counterparts that their era of political monopoly was over, and that it was time for them to make room for the democratic forces of Europe. In Poland, for example, Gorbachev directly intervened in the summer of 1989 on behalf of the Solidarity opposition movement, telling Poland’s communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski that it was time to for the communist regime to share power with the Solidarity opposition. One month later, Poland’s first post-communist Premier since World War II came to power.
Similar events transpired throughout the Soviet empire and beyond. Gorbachev repeatedly coaxed democratic change throughout Soviet-dominated Central and Eastern Europe and throughout the Soviet spheres of influence in Africa and Asia. Gorbachev’s openness and reforms also had a ricochet effect of undermining extreme right-wing regimes around the world, whose raison d’etre had been their opposition to Soviet communism. In this way, Gorbachev’s democratic reforms weakened the anti-communist racist regime in South Africa, and bolstered Nelson Mandela’s democratic revolution in South Africa…
Russia has suffered from authoritarian rule for centuries, so Russia’s transition to democracy was bound to be an epic challenge, and so it has proved to be. Today’s brave young people protesting on the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities are making the strongest claim in Russia’s modern history for true democratic rule. Russia’s current regime is dug in, but the power of youth, massed in protest, will eventually prevail. Whether the protesters recognize it or not, their coming achievements will build on the decisive contributions of Russia’s greatest living statesmen, Mikhail Gorbachev.
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