A homage by Ralph T. Niemeyer
As a Marxist and a staunch socialist to this day, what have I worked through on the first and last President of the USSR, repeatedly challenged and criticized him, above all for allowing the Soviet Union to be easily put at the disposal of Russia to feed ruinous western capitalism, to serve NATO a non-fighting victory on a silver platter, to subject the life prospects and life expectancy of hundreds of millions of people to the dictates of the World Bank, IMF and Club of Paris banks, what did I ask Mikhail Gorbachev hard, tried to corner him and how generous he was to keep talking to me. My bitterness about the desperation, which I thought unnecessarily admitted to the defeat of socialism 30 years ago, has long since given way to the disenchantment that feeds on the realization that Mikhail Gorbachev simply had no choice after he, out of friendliness, turned to the playground of the imperialist Westens let go, where it was a matter of comparing every political decision with the bonus and malus of the stock markets. I HAVE DONE UNRIGHT TO MICHAIL GORBACHEV IN PULLING HIM OF TREASURE BECAUSE PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST ALSO DIDN'T LEAD TO MORE FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY, BUT FROM WESTERN POLITICS OF THE GUNSWARDS OF THE SUNMARIES AS THE INVESTIGATION OF THE GUNS OF THE HUNMIES THE NATO, HAS BEEN USED. Did he have a choice? That is the question and if you are honest you can only say: No, because it was too late. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had already run down after Stalinism in 1953 and Khrustschow was ultimately not strong enough to push through the necessary reforms, which Andropov would try again 30 years later and which were finally implemented by Gorbachev. Therefore, after Khrustschow opened the window, there was no scope for real democratic reforms to be implemented, and finally, after a while, regressive forces that were able to secure power and privileges prevailed again. Under Leonid Brezhnev there was even the tentative attempt by GDR State Council Chairman Walter Ulbricht to introduce the New Economic System (NÖS) from 1968 to 1972, which allowed medium-sized entrepreneurship and also pecuniary incentives, but above all reformed the planned economy, which was urgently needed was strangled and Ulbricht was replaced by Honecker, which had also meant a fatal step backwards, if not the end of the socialist alternative system as a whole. The late wife of Walter Ulbricht, Lotte, who translated Russian for her husband as a language mediator and was present at the last meeting with Brezhnev, told me in the early 1990s that Brezhnev had openly said that the USSR could not cope with the reformed GDR, even if it did the NÖS should be successful and could mean a kind of third way for socialism, if the USSR and also the Comecon states would not be able to restructure their system accordingly. In other words, because the GDR could be saved with the NES and would trump the USSR and its power bloc, the GDR had to be pushed back into the ranks, since the powerful in Moscow feared for their beneficiaries, like the capitalists of the West in every financial crisis. I spoke to Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time when it was actually too late: on February 11, 1990 after Chancellor Kohl's state visit to Moscow. Kohl told me into my camera that “a new constitution has to be created”, from which he withdrew only one month later after the Volkskammer election, which had gone well for the CDU's bourgeois partners in the GDR, and in view of the - Economy as a result of the economic reforms of the post-socialist Modrow - government, which no longer clearly indicated a mood in favor of a rapid unification of the two provisional German state structures, pushed for a quick “lower unification” according to “Article 23” of the Basic Law. Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed to me at the time that Kohl had also spoken to him about a new constitution and even a peace treaty. Gorbachev said he welcomed this, but understood that the Western Allies would be skeptical of a truly sovereign Germany. When I asked why he would not have this guaranteed as a condition, he denied that he trusted Kohl. WHOEVER KNEW KOHL KNOWS THAT IF HE HAD ANYTHING IN THE HEAD, THIS WOULD ALSO BE IMPLEMENTED, WHERE HIS FIRST THOUGHT WAS MOST CLASSIC CAPITALISTIC: IT HAD TO BE FOVED WITH MONEY And so there were financial promises after promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he had denigrated a few years earlier as communist "Goebbels". Of course, most of them were not complied with and Mr. Gorbachev can be accused of naivety here, because just as little as the guarantees from Messrs. Genscher and Baker, who asserted to me a few days before the “unification” that there was no intention of the Bundeswehr or even NATO troops to deploy in the area of the soon then former GDR (East Germany) and "not beyond" (Genscher), was contractually secured in some way, were the promises of the then united Germany that war would never again start from German soil, let alone any aggression In particular, there would be no more than smoke and mirrors vis-à-vis Russia in the sense of a raison d'être, which the NATO war of aggression against Serbia and the increasingly Russophobic and inflammatory language used by federal politicians, transatlanticists and above all the so-called "Greens" prove. I spoke with Mikhail Gorbachev the second time when he emerged from the negotiating room of the Lancaster House of the London G7 meeting on June 17, 1991 with a clearly desperate expression on his face. I asked him what the matter was and he said frankly that the G7 group would ask him to open the Soviet market unconditionally and immediately. My objection that this would probably mean the collapse of the same, Mr. Gorbachev affirmed and said that he had therefore also refused. What would the G7 do now? I asked and he replied resignedly: "Now they will support Yeltsin." In other words, the blackmail did not work, but Mikhail Gorbachev and the USSR were at the end of it, outmaneuvered by tough Western capitalists who promise the blue of the sky without blinking just to gain time, re-election or a momentary, not always long-term, strategic advantage. So is the economic system, which also did not "win" after the Cold War, but only remained and which, unlike socialism, which was supposed to protect against crises, makes conscious use of the kind that one is just experiencing on one's own skin. In August 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev took the opportunity of a coup and tried to take himself prisoner in the Crimea in order to provoke that his greatest opponents in the secret service and the military could come out and fire them afterwards. The plan went wrong, because Boris Yeltsin was quickly heaved onto a tank by the IMF and the Western media and the legend of Gorbachev's “democratic” opponent was knitted with the images thus created. Three years later, I took part in a Club of Paris conference with Boris Yeltsin, smuggled in by a top manager of WestLB, and then saw with my own eyes how the western bankers were defeating the Russian president with interest rate moratoriums and IMF stand-by loans, so that This finally decreed privatizations and lowering of the social standards, all of which are responsible for the great poverty and lowering of the average age to 58 years for men in the former Soviet Union, and at the same time the greatest frauds created a caste of oligarchs, which to this day even President Putin sometimes kills make it hard. IT IS UNFAIR AND UNHISTORIC TO BLAME THESE MISTAKE DEVELOPMENTS MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, BUT ALSO HE WAS IMPROPRIATELY THE TRIGGER WITH PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST, BECAUSE THE NEWLY CREATED INFORMATION OF THE FREEDOM AND DEMOCRATIZATION ALSO WAS INTO THE LAWS DEMOCRACY THAT MEPS AND MINISTERS ENRICH YOURSELF The USA, of all places, in which one can hardly achieve high office without hundreds of millions of dollars in industrial donations or personal credit lines as in the case of the presumably long bankrupt Trump, served as a blueprint for the political and economic development of the entire former Eastern bloc, where often put former secret agents in the right positions. A refined and intellectual man like Mikhail Gorbachev had no chance against this decline in morality, just as those Western politicians who had previously demanded unilateral concessions from him dropped him coldly when they installed the IMF, dissolved the Warsaw Pact and had brought the GDR into NATO. I was furious at the time and asked Mikhail Gorbachev 12 days before the end of the USSR in an almost two-hour interview whether the program was running now, which Stalin once said with the words, “If we should not manage to be better than the West, then join NATO ”, similar to how Hitler is supposed to have said at the end, if the German“ people ”are too weak, then they do not deserve to survive. Herr Gorbachev was visibly piqued at my question and dismissed it far from himself, but admitted that he had misjudged the matter. For a long time I believed that it was possible that Mikhail Gorbachev might have had some kind of deal with US intelligence. Only in the Ukraine crisis, in which he behaved absolutely correctly, did I understand that he had really only failed with his lofty ideals and had by no means willingly made dirty deals with the West. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2014, at the height of the war in Ukraine, we were invited to the state ceremony. But because Mr. Gorbachev had expressed himself understandingly for President Putin and critical of the West, there was only room for him at the "cat table" of the celebratory dinner, next to me, because I had to be invited as one of the questioners to the Schabowskis press conference, but I am also actually “persona non-grata” in Berlin politics and so after a long time we had the opportunity to talk to each other in detail.
I apologized for some inappropriate criticism and Mr. Gorbachev expressed understanding that one could see his role wrongly at the time. Somehow he wanted to believe in the good and even today he does not accuse his negotiating partners of bad machinations, they just represent the interests of their respective states in a capitalist system. For humanism, I realized that much that evening, in capitalism and imperialism there is at most room at the cat’s table. I bow to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who is now 90 years old, and I sincerely wish him all the best. If only we had more “Gorbis” on all sides of politics!
