This is apropos a three-part series of articles titled "A century of revolution and counter-revolution" carried by Business Recorder . The writer, Rashed Rahman, has thrown ample light on the subject that he brought under the spotlight of historiography. He has argued, among other things, that "the backdrop to the 1991 collapse was the attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev, elevated to leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, to reform the Soviet system under the rubric perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). What Gorbachev and the Soviet Union learnt to their cost is that an arguably stagnant, bureaucratized and alienated-from-the-people system is at greatest risk when it tries to reform. The rest is history."

The writer, however, seems to have lost sight of the fact that glasnost and perestroika were not aimed at reform; these so-called creative ideas or policies were conceived, planned and executed with view to accelerating the demise of the USSR. That perestroika and glasnost added to the Soviet Union's problems is a fact. Gorbachev gave people hope for reform in the first two years after 1985, but he had no strategy or plan about how to fulfil those promises because he was ultimately seeking to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

How could the world forget that in 1988, Time magazine selected Gorbachev to be its "Man of the Year" for his work towards ending the Cold War. The next year, it named him as its "Man of the Decade". In 1990, Gorbachev won the Nobel Prize! No doubt, the study of the writing of history and of written histories is a fascinating field.



Copyright Business Recorder, 2017