This week’s death of former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev at the age of 91 has triggered an avalanche of commentary and tribute around the world, mostly focusing on Gorbachev’s role in the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet system for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
A sidebar to the story that probably deserves more prominence than it’s received, however, is that the Mikhail Gorbachev the world is now lauding, meaning the reformer and change agent, arguably never would have come to be without the moral and political pressures on the Soviet system created by Pope John Paul II.
Let’s recall the tick-tock in the Gorbachev story.
Born in 1931, for most of his career Gorbachev followed the path of the typical Soviet apparatchik. He became a member of the Community Party’s Central Committee in 1978, the same year the Archbishop of Krakow was elected to the papacy, and a few months later Gorbachev became a member of the Politburo – the same time, as it turns out, the new pontiff was making his historic first visit to Poland, showing the world a people collectively asserting an alternative vision of life to official Soviet ideology.