![]() Wurmbrand had confronted the communist party over its persecution of the church and was brutalised relentlessly for his faith. And the dreadful risk of speaking your mind.ġ968 was the year Czechoslovakia spoke its mind, the year of the Prague Spring, when Czech hopefuls sought to break free from Soviet control, only to find their hopes crushed by Russian tanks.ġ968 was also the year that Christians in the West took inspiration from a Rumanian pastor called Richard Wurmbrand. In his memoirs, Gorbachev speaks with dismay about the dead hand of bureaucracy, the inefficiency, the sheer pressure to conform. Yet his own faith in that myth was already failing. He was now being paid to perpetuate the communist myth and was building his reputation upon it. He said: ‘I was shocked, bewildered and lost.’Įven so, he pursued a post-war career in the Communist Party, joining the youth division, the Komsomol, as deputy head of agitation and propaganda. It was a major blow to his political faith. But it was only after many years that the young Gorbachev awoke to the realisation that Stalin himself was behind much of the bloodletting. The Second World War also left its mark, as did Stalin’s purges. Gorbachev later recalled: ‘They took him away in the middle of the night.’ Grandpa’s arrest, he said, was his ‘first real trauma’. Then Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather was arrested as a counter revolutionary and charged with sabotaging the collective endeavour. His protest that he had no seeds to plant fell on deaf ears. Gorbachev’s paternal grandfather was hauled away for refusing to plant his seeds. To say it didn’t work would be an understatement. This herding together of farmers robbed individuals of initiative and reward and rubbed against the grain of traditional farming. The son of peasant farmers, the young Mikhail Gorbachev had his first taste of Russian persecution when his grandfathers were arrested for failing to throw their weight behind the forced collectivisation of Soviet farming. What shaped the man who changed our world? ![]() Like Samson, Gorbachev tore the pillars down and brought the entire edifice down around him. It was Gorbachev who prised open the iron grip of the Communist Party with his pursuit of glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring.īut far from those reforms leading to a new golden new age for Russia, they led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was the driving power who pushed for an end to the Cold War, who turned the arms race around and potentially averted a nuclear Armageddon. Andrew Boyd looks back on the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev on the long history of persecution… With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and Gorbachev’s crucial refusal to intervene to prevent it, the Cold War (Part 1) came to an end. One part of that was to lead to our change of name from Christian Mission to the Communist World to Release International. The final President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, has left a lasting legacy.
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