PEACE QUEST CAPE BRETON PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

Peace Quest Cape Breton is deeply saddened by news of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), the last leader of the Soviet Union, whose short, tumultuous time in power (1985-91) ended the Cold War, perhaps saved the world from nuclear war, and opened the path to a radically demilitarized, completely denuclearized Europe and planet. 

“The tragic fact that that path was not taken by his successors in Russia, or by western leaders then and now,” PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard comments, “does not detract from the profound, peaceful logic of his vision, a vision of common, mutual, human security shared by millions of people, and most of the world’s nations.” The main reason, Howard added, that Gorbachev’s ‘common European home’ was never built, was the “strategically senseless, politically criminal expansion of NATO,” the world’s only nuclear-armed alliance, which “should have been disbanded, not enlarged, when the Cold War ended.” 

Gorbachev himself felt betrayed by NATO leaders, who vowed they would expand “not one inch” eastward, and looked on in horror as a new Cold War and the rise of an anti-western Russian autocracy took shape. And though he was gravely ill by the time of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, one can only imagine his horror at the new hells unleashed by the demons of militarism and nationalism he strove so hard to banish.  

What might have been – and could still be – was expressed most powerfully by Gorbachev in his famous speech to the UN in December 1988. “It is evident that force or the threat of force neither can nor should be instruments of foreign policy,” he declared: “The very idea of the nature and criteria of progress is changing. To assume that the problems tormenting humankind can be solved by the means and methods that were used or that seemed to be suitable in the past is naïve.” “And now,” he concluded, “for the most important thing of all, without which no other issue of the forthcoming age can be solved, that is, disarmament”.

For Gorbachev, the most important of those ‘other issues’ was the environment, particularly climate change, and in the 1990s he founded Green Cross International to help draw the links between the two existential threats to life on Earth: nuclear war, and global warming.  

Peace Quest Cape Breton believes the best way to honour Gorbachev’s legacy is to recover the spirit and revive the promise of those words: to remember that our common humanity – ‘the most important thing of all’ – depends on peace and disarmament, ‘and now.’