PRIVOLNOYE, Russia -- When Mikhail Gorbachev visited the village of his birth a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, the last leader of the communist empire sat near the golden wheat field that he once plowed with his father and shed tears as he reminisced about the past.
The moving scene, which was captured in filmmaker Vitaly Mansky’s 2001 documentary Gorbachev: After Empire, focused attention on the humble origins of the soft-spoken village boy who would ascend to the highest echelons of power in a fading superpower that had straddled a sixth of the world’s land surface.
Thirty years ago, on December 8, 1991, the U.S.S.R. was declared defunct by the leaders of its Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian constituent republics during a hastily convened meeting at a forest resort near the Polish border. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as the president of a country that had ceased to exist.
“The totalitarian system, which for a long time deprived the country of the opportunity to become prosperous and flourishing, has been eliminated,” he said in a televised speech, defending the liberal reforms that had loosened the government’s grip. “The old system collapsed before a new one had time to start working.”
Gorbachev, who turned 90 this year, is now largely confined to his residence on a plot of government land near the Moscow homes of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other prominent officials and celebrities. He rarely gives interviews, his assistant and former interpreter Pavel Palazhchenko told RFE/RL.
But in an extensive essay published in August, he wrote that “if I could start again, I would do many things differently.”
Surveys suggest that a large number of Russians also wish they could turn back the clock. Even as its last leader retreats from public view, nostalgia for the Soviet Union remains widespread. A 2020 poll by the independent Levada Center found that two-thirds of Russians missed the U.S.S.R. and cited “stability, order, and confidence in tomorrow” as key features of the society that was. A similar proportion expressed a conviction that its collapse could have been avoided.
The Russian government has done nothing to formally mark the 30th anniversary of the Soviet collapse, which President Vladimir Putin -- in power now for more than two-thirds of the period since its disintegration -- described in 2005 as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, is considering a declaration formalizing that assessment.
Reverberations of the breakup are being felt strongly today, with Russia seeking to undo some of its main consequences, stop the eastward expansion of NATO, and pull Ukraine back into its orbit -- and threatening to use force if it doesn’t get its way.
In the Western imagination, the Soviet Union has been immortalized as a brutal regime and a warning to future generations. But for many in Russia, its loss left a void and a strong sense that life, then, was better. A mere 1 percent of respondents to Levada’s survey mentioned the worst crimes of the system, including the forced-labor camps of the gulag, the political repressions, and the executions that are synonymous with the U.S.S.R. in the West.
This selective memory is crucial to understanding the vilification of Gorbachev in some quarters. The man who sought to reform the system through his policies of perestroika and glasnost after he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, critics say, overestimated the moribund, creaking system’s capacity to change.
The notion that he naively misread events is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in his native region. In Privolnoye, a placid town of 3,500 residents in southern Russia’s Stavropol Krai, about 200 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, hammer-and-sickle flags flutter above garden gates and murals of revolutionary Vladimir Lenin grace the entrances to homes. Older residents recall Gorbachev with a mixture of pride and disappointment.
“We can’t say anything bad about him. He’s a native son who reached the pinnacles of power. Maybe we’ll judge him in 50 years,” said Aleksei Martynov, 65, who keeps a vast collection of Lenin’s ideological treatises and other Soviet-themed memorabilia in his home. “In Soviet times, this village was twice the size and had three schools, a factory, three pig farms, and plenty of work to go around. We miss those times.”
The modest home where Gorbachev spent his childhood no longer exists, and the small house where his parents Maria and Sergei lived in later years is now occupied by Valentina Sevastyanova, an 82-year-old pensioner who complains of ill health and laments the lack of welfare programs and public transport links in the village.
“We’re uneducated, simple people here. We don’t understand high politics,” she said on a blustery recent afternoon as she did chores in her small garden. “But we feel insulted. Gorbachev did nothing for us.”
In 1973, local collective farm bosses ordered a new brick house built for Maria and Sergei, whose son had by now become the head of Stavropol Krai. Sergei Belykh, the former district chief and a friend of Gorbachev’s, has lobbied for years to have the now empty building turned into a museum honoring the last Soviet leader, but local officials have been reluctant to stump up the money.
It was during Gorbachev’s visit to Privolnoye in 2000, when he tearfully recalled his past before the camera, that Belykh asked him over a glass of vodka why he hadn’t done more to stop the country from collapsing.
“He said that if he had tried to prevent it, revolution or even bloodshed would likely have followed,” Belykh told RFE/RL. “But I think he also didn’t have the guts, and unfortunately many people in these parts agree.”
As Russia careened toward economic collapse in the decade that followed the Soviet breakup, plunging millions deeper into hardship as society struggled to adapt to an unbridled market economy, many pointed at Gorbachev as the man to blame. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union grew in tandem with disillusionment over what came after.
A version of that sentiment has waxed and waned in the years since, throughout the turbulent decade-long rule of President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and the subsequent tenure of Putin, who was appointed acting president by Yeltsin on the last day of 1999 and has been president or prime minister ever since.
Now, amid anger over widespread corruption and growing inequality in Russia’s post-Soviet society, much of the generation that came of age under Gorbachev associates the U.S.S.R. -- an economically mismanaged country that was teetering on the edge even before his rule -- with an idealized youth and a sense of solidarity that appears at odds with the atomization present today.
And as the number of people with direct experience of the Soviet system grows smaller, the very nature of Soviet nostalgia is changing, says Ilya Budraitskis, an expert on Russia’s left at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.
“In the 1990s, the dominant nostalgia was one based on very concrete experiences of the Soviet period, of perceived stability and belief in the future -- all things that were lost in the '90s,” he said. “Today, Soviet nostalgia among those who never experienced actual Soviet life has come to revolve around an imaginary past.”
In the Stavropol region, regular reports of corruption make that mirage a comforting mental escape. In July, investigators published photos of an ostentatiously ornate and kitschy mansion, complete with marble floors and golden bathroom fixtures, that was acquired by local police chief Aleksei Safonov under a lucrative embezzlement scheme allegedly run by dozens of his subordinates in law enforcement.
On the road to Privolnoye from the regional capital, Stavropol, a sprawling auto plant with the capacity to produce 100 vehicles per year was forced to close a year after completion in 2017 due to alleged tax arrears and has been shuttered ever since, a gigantic hub of inactivity that represents for many locals the dangers of uncontrolled graft and mismanagement.
“They laundered the money and left,” said Bogdan Dorodnov, a 24-year-old taxi driver who dreams of leaving Russia to work abroad. “It’s nothing new.”
Soviet nostalgia, which has been shrewdly played upon by Putin and his government, is not always benign or purely the stuff of daydreams. It is also fueling a network of fringe movements that encourages a backlash against the state and touts conspiracy theories that convince a large number of disillusioned, cash-strapped citizens that the Soviet Union never really died and that Russia, to which they’re legally obliged to pay taxes, is an illegitimate state.
It also comes as the freedoms that followed the Soviet collapse are being dismantled and organizations established to shed light on Soviet-era crimes come under fire. Russia has outlawed the most viable opposition movement -- the political network of jailed politician Aleksei Navalny -- while Memorial, an NGO established in the final years of Soviet rule to investigate dark pages of Russia’s past and document current human rights abuses, is facing possible closure after being declared a “foreign agent” by the state.
Levada, the respected pollster, has been declared a “foreign agent” along with dozens of other groups and media organizations that investigate corruption and abuses of power.
Outside the entrances to Gorbachev’s former high school in Krasnogvardeiskoye, a village 15 kilometers from Privolnoye, a metal plaque commemorates his time as a student in the modest three-story building.
Oksana Akulova, the school’s 48-year-old director, says her pupils today have little interest in Soviet history or Gorbachev’s role in it. For years, she would write annually to the nonprofit foundation that Gorbachev established in 1991 and ask for his assistance in promoting the school in academic competitions.
But in recent years, she said, staff at the foundation have stopped answering, and Gorbachev has largely withdrawn from its day-to-day duties.
“For me, personally, he’s a great man -- a peasant boy who became general secretary,” she said. “But, to be honest, more and more people have a bad view of him now.”
