The death of the last socialist: RIP Mikhail Gorbachev.

It was for me the most hopeful moment in my time - after the Watergate affair announced the arrival of the neoliberal era through the trivializing of the struggle to end the war in Vietnam by blaming the American President for a scandal associated with his character, who was effectively declared mentally ill by the competing political party, instead of for genocide in the conduct of the war. In the immediate years leading up to the collapse of “Communism” after the spectacular assertions of real workers’ power by the Polish union Solidarity, many of us in the West could for a short moment gaze into a window that was briefly almost opened, hoping that what we had always wanted to see happen in our country might happen in another part of the world.

The whole movement internationally around 1968 was against the Cold War as such, having announced a plague on both their houses. Now, in the last few years of Communism before the events in Hungary and Poland that finally brought the end of the Berlin Wall and all that it represented, it was possible to wonder whether, while China was already going the way of an authoritarian police-state capitalism, Russia and Eastern Europe might well be moving towards a genuine democratic socialism. (That word was used at times by people over there, and it still has currency today, even in America, though it now seems to designate less an option than a question to which no one quite has an answer.) But the last Soviet leader's efforts were too little and too late. History does not divide between tragedy and farce, as Marx said, but between tragedy, with the hopeful incompleteness that may follow it, and some kind of murderous epic, as the period we are still living in amply demonstrates. Tragic figures desire the good, and even in failure, we honor them.