The world once had Gorbachev and Mandela. Now we have Trump, Johnson and Truss | Jonathan Freedland

ithis is a very unfashionable idea. The “great man theory” of history seems completely out of date, the intellectual equivalent of a forgotten statue of a general on horseback. Nowadays, we like to think that our world is shaped not by individuals, heroic or otherwise, but by deep, underlying forces—that there is a tide of history that this man or that woman may ride for a while, but which must leap forward regardless.

Still, this week brought two starkly contrasting reminders of just how much people matter, especially those at the top. Of course, this idea is important to how we view our past. But even more important is how we view the present and the future.

The first reminder came after death Mikhail Gorbachev. He became a despised or despised person in his native country. Vladimir Putin gave him a perfunctory send-off: he announced that he would not attend his predecessor’s funeral, only laying a wreath at Gorbachev’s coffin in the hospital, where he breathed his last.

But that disrespect cannot hide the truth, which was that Gorbachev was one of the most significant figures of the 20th century, and his impact was enormous not only Russia but worldwide. It ended the Cold War, which had seen East and West draw nuclear daggers for four decades; a confrontation that required two generations to live in constant fear of atomic Armageddon. That Putin is now reviving that terror, threatening to expose Moscow’s nuclear arsenal if NATO prevents him from destroying Ukraine, only underscores how blessed the past 30 years have been without him.

Gorbachev began a train to destroy the expanding empire that deprived the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe of freedom of thought, speech, conscience and movement. Today’s European Union, which consists of 27 member states, would be smaller and very different if Gorbachev had not made such a move. The unification of Germany, the liberation of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Vilnius, Tallinn – all this happened at a very high speed and, most importantly, in most places without a shot being fired.

Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and freed imprisoned or exiled dissidents at home, gradually freed the press, opened archives, organized open multiparty elections, and set about dismantling the totalitarian system that had tyrannized Russia for more than 70 years. He gave Russians a taste of freedom.

The temptation now is to say all that was inevitable, that the Soviet Union was so rotten and corrupt and sclerotic that its collapse was inevitable, whether it was Gorbachev in the Kremlin or anyone else. However, according to researcher Archie Brown wrote in these pages this week it’s a “fallacy” even if it’s popular in the west. The Politburo that appointed Gorbachev didn’t lose its grip and certainly didn’t decide: “We can’t live like this anymore.” Gorbachev understood that using the same words.

Simply put, there were no laws of physics or inevitable floods that drove these events. There were the decisions of one man, unusually inclined to change his mind. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was one such turning point: the Kremlin’s instinct for secrecy proved disastrous, and then gave way to glasnost, or openness or transparency.

There was nothing inevitable about it, just as it did not predict that the end of Soviet totalitarianism would lead to the chaos and impoverishment with which Gorbachev’s name is associated in today’s Russia and for which he is not forgiven. Nor was it inevitable that Russia would launch a murderous invasion of its neighbor Ukraine in February. Those actions were the result of the decisions of leaders, individuals and people.

When I came of age in the 1980s, some things were considered reading. One was that the Soviet Union was a permanent object, its contours indelibly marked on the atlas, replaced only by an epic and bloody war. Another thing is that while apartheid in South Africa may one day end, such a transformation will also result in horrific carnage, the blood of the black majority and the white minority to blame. Both of these assumptions ignored the character of the men at the top. Nelson Mandela, like Gorbachev, was not interested in following a pre-written script. He chose an approach that no one predicted, one that was willing to sacrifice a lot for a peaceful transition, reconciliation and healing.

The result of the collapse of those two cursed systems, apartheid and the Soviet Union, was a kind of optimism multiplier. In the early 1990s, it seemed that there were no political or geopolitical barriers that could not be removed: Northern Ireland had a cease-fire and peace agreements between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Indeed, another world seemed possible.

Today, the phrase is a slogan that sounds less like a statement of fact than a prayer. We look around and see the serious problems we face, from energy bills so high we don’t know if the poorest will survive, to a (related) cost-of-living crisis that could leave millions more vulnerable to the threat that has begun. fascism in the usa Joe Biden rightly pointed out Thursday to an already-existing climate emergency as evidenced by receding floods in Pakistan even a third of the country is under water.

The challenges are so great, but the quality of political leadership is so poor. Few seem qualified to grasp, let alone match, the magnitude of the task we face. And we move on to the second reminder of this week. The contest for the Tory crown ended at 5pm today, with Liz Truss expected to be announced as Britain’s new prime minister on Monday. This fact, combined with the bleak global outlook and the prolonged presence of Donald Trump in the US, is enough to create the opposite mood of the 1990s, a pessimistic multiplier effect.

Because that’s the downside of recognizing the importance of a figure like Gorbachev, recognizing that at the highest level the nature of a personality can make the difference between peace and war, prosperity and poverty: it works both ways. Brits needn’t be told that a rogue, delusional leader at the helm can prove disastrous: we’ve been living with that reality for three years. Now we will have the same lesson again.

And yet the same theory of history and politics offers little consolation. None of our current deadly problems are inevitable: even the climate crisis, or at least its magnitude, can be affected by human activity. It depends on who we choose to do the work and how they do it. This week I spoke with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who was a correspondent in Moscow during Gorbachev’s time. “Sometimes a leader’s imagination and humanity can be so in sync with the story that good things happen,” he said. “And that’s important to hold on to.” In other words, as Al Gore liked to quip, the good news about political leadership is this: It’s a renewable resource.

This article was amended in 2022. September 3 In the previous version it was written that “the liberation of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Vilnius, Tallinn … took place at a winding speed and … without a shot.” The text has been amended to clarify that not all of these cities were violence-free.

• Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian. To listen to his Politics Weekly America podcast, search for Politics Weekly America on Apple, Spotify, Acast, or wherever you get your podcasts.