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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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Gorbachev 20 years later

A gang of thugs kidnaps a passenger jet. They want to keep the passengers in fear claiming to possess superior ideology and above all are decided not to stop before committing any moral crimes. They kill the pilots and try to crash the plane spectacularly. Suddenly one of them decides to abort the suicide mission. He lands the plane; most of the passengers that haven't already been killed are saved. The thugs face justice. Their ringleader expects a hero welcome by the grateful humanity for letting some terrified passengers to see their relatives again. His name is Mikhail Gorbachev.

Not so time intense but not less dramatic as we saw above, the history of communism was a history of thugs that at least in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Europe apparently decided at the last moment to save innocent lives. They couldn't make the plane fly for a long, they couldn't make the passengers happy. The only thing they were unmatched into was their ability to kill, 80 million in less than a century according to some independent observers. Should they be given a prize for leaving some people alive including the author of this article? Some of them believe they should. Their moral excuse is that actually those who have landed the plane weren't those who initially took the hostages.

20 years after Gorbachev took power I can see two main camps of commentators, one of those who praise his (mis) accomplishments, the other that condemns him for betraying communism, and the empire, and the camp. For some he's an angel, for the others a demon. No shades of gray. Killing thousands between 1985-1991 in the Baltics and in the Caucasus, to mention just two bloody episodes, fit neither with the Western angelical nor the die-hard demonical image of Gorbachev. Was he a murderer like all his predecessors? True but to a certain degree, but this doesn't make him completely innocent. In a time when the system demanded sacrificing millions to stay intact he was reluctant to shed the blood of more than several thousands.

He believed in the spontaneous élan of the masses to improve the socialism, as Mao believed in the revolutionary guards of teenage hooligans to clean the party and state from its more conservative elements. I'm afraid to think about this but the whole Perestroika campaign was indeed aimed to create a sense of pathological hate among the people toward those that were at the tops. Eventually that hate toppled communism, not the imaginary desire to build capitalism that people were for decades taught to hate. This hate could have been directed to produce other results as we have seen in China in mid-1960s. Gorbachev hasn't killed many people but by the same token Mao too left these bloody assignments on the spontaneous élan of the revolutionary guards. By the same token Hitler hasn't signed any document for extermination of the Jews in Europe. Does this fact make him innocent too? The inferno machine was turning with his tacit approval.

The notion of democratic communism as produced during the Gorbachev has no more democratic meaning than democratic Hitlerism. Allowing the German population in general to take part in the Holocaust by sending Jews to the gas chambers couldn't have been less murderous because of its "democratic" character. Almost a million Jews were murdered in Ukraine and Belarus in late 1941 with the very active participation of the local communities. After this brief period of "democratic" Holocaust Hitler decided to continue it in the old bureaucratic fashion by constructing huge extermination camps. By the way, murdering a few in the Coliseum was part of the Roman system of mass entertainments too. It's the fact of the murder and the number of killed that matter most, not to which extent the public was allowed to be a part of the ceremony.

Gorbachev lost his bet. The people turned not only against those that had to be removed anyway but also against the system as such. The only way for the old regimes to keep a stake into power was to dress themselves into nationalist clothes and to try to privatize as much as possible discovering overnight the good sides of the private property protection mechanisms. Somewhere they did it remarkably well, elsewhere just well. According to one statistics at least half of the new ruling classes (members of the parliaments, ministers, regional governors, presidents and their immediate advisors) are in fact part of the old Nomenklatura. Somewhere like in some Central Asian republics this share reaches almost 100%. The plan A to get rid of political opponents within the communist system using the mass participation being a failure, the plan B to keep the power using the liberal democracy as an excuse can be said to have succeeded almost everywhere, except perhaps in East Germany which was literally taken over by its more powerful western neighbor.

20 years after Gorbachev many former communist countries live apparently completely different lives. What has begun as an attempt to mobilize mass movement for improving the socialism has turned into gradual demolition of the system itself. Nowhere like Central Europe this has happened so spectacular. The man who started all this, admired by some and cursed by others, Mikhail Gorbachev still waits for his personal praise for have saved the remaining passengers.