On Christmas Day 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev officially resigned his function as Soviet President. He thereby also placed his signature on the death certificate of his country. It is true that the Soviet Union had been moribund for some time, but it was Gorbachev's resignation that made the death official. On that day the red Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle was lowered from, the Kremlin, the Russian tricolour took its place, and the Russian president assumed most of the Soviet president's functions – including his control of the late Soviet Union's nuclear button.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is a momentous event, and its effects will be far-reaching, for good or ill – and probably for both. The free world, although realizing that the Soviet collapse serves as an additional proof that the Cold War is over, has not greeted the event with much cheer. It becomes clearer every day that the world we live in is still imperfect, and perhaps not all that much more secure than it was before the beginning of the Great Thaw. Gorbachev's parting remark that he faced the future with apprehension has struck a chord throughout the world. Politicians and the media are busily, and rather nervously, analysing the situation in the Soviet Union's successor-states.

The End of an Era⤒🔗

That did not become the big concern until after Christmas, however. The focus of attention on Christmas day itself was less on the possible consequences of the Soviet break-up than on the man who had presided over that break-up and, in the process, made his own position redundant. The announcement of his departure hardly came as a surprise. Gorbachev's fate, like that of the Soviet Union, had been decided earlier. It had become inevitable when the republics of Russia, Belarus (the former Byelorussia), and Ukraine established their Commonwealth of Independent States, a Commonwealth which eight of the nine remaining republics joined subsequently. Nevertheless, the announcement of the resignation, when it finally came, caused strong reactions internationally, and for one day reminiscences about the Gorbachev era and reports about Gorbachev himself – about his achievements and failures, his fate and future – dominated the news broadcasts.

That kind of response, short-lived as it was, was appropriate, for with Gorbachev's departure we have reached the end of a brief but important era in history. Gorbachev may have bungled his policy of economic reform, he may have failed in his attempts to keep the old Union together, and in the process he may have become one of the most cordially hated men at home – all this does not detract from the fact that he was a statesman of stature, whose actions greatly (and often positively) affected his own country and the rest of the world. As he himself reminded his listeners in his resignation speech, it was during his tenure that the Cold War was concluded. Soviet interference in the affairs of other nations ended, and democratic and religious freedoms were extended to millions: to the Soviet Union's own peoples and to those of the Soviet satellites in East-Central Europe.

Historical Determinism?←⤒🔗

In listing these achievements Gorbachev implied that, his failures notwithstanding, his place in history is secure. The question as to how history will judge him has been raised also by others, both critics and well-wishers. If history continues for any length of time it will undoubtedly be a topic of interest for generations of historians to come. When considering the question, one is reminded of the old controversy between the “Great Men” and the deterministic views of history. These are the two views or schools or philosophies between which historians can choose when trying to decide about the causes of historical changes.

The deterministic school says that individuals per se have little or no direct influence on the historical process. According to a famous adherent of that school, the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the course of history is determined by the Weltgeist or world spirit. That Weltgeist grabs the individual he needs for a certain event or era in history and discards him (or her) when the work is completed. One can therefore not say, according to Hegel, that individuals like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar (or Mikhail Gorbachev) themselves caused historical changes. Great men were no more than the agent, or at the most the incarnation, of the world spirit. Hegelians used to like to refer to Napoleon, for example, as “The World Spirit on Horseback.”

Some of Hegel's followers have retained his determinism but got rid of his Weltgeist. They replaced that spirit by impersonal secular forces – such as social, technological, economic, or demographic ones – or by immutable historical “laws,” or by both. Karl Marx, who had studied Hegel, is probably the best-known of this type of historical determinist. According to him it was these secular forces and these laws of history that governed the historical process, and deter minded its outcome. That outcome was, of course, the final socialist revolution, the victory of the proletariat, and the communist paradise.

It is striking that in spite of men like Marx himself and Lenin and his successors, who so drastically influenced history, Marxists continued to adhere to this deterministic philosophy. And it is ironic that Gorbachev, who so far seems to have clung to his communist convictions, nevertheless implied that he personally has helped change the course of history. Life, a Dutch proverb says, is stronger than doctrine.

Or Human Responsibility←⤒🔗

There have been Christians who endorsed Hegel's view, which, they thought, was close to the biblical one. All you had to do, so they reasoned, was to replace Hegel's Weltgeist by “divine providence” in order to make Hegelianism into a Christian philosophy of history. They were wrong, and it is unlikely that this kind of Christian Hegelianism can be widespread in our days, after the world has witnessed the crimes of a Lenin, a Stalin, and a Hitler. For at bottom historical determinism is both an anti-human and an anti-Christian philosophy. Firstly because it makes man, the crown of God's creation, into a robot, and secondly because it says that whatever happens has been pre-ordained, and that therefore the individual, no matter what his crimes, is blameless. The Bible does not teach that. It does teach, indeed, that not man but Christ Jesus is in control of history, but nowhere are we told that this negates man's responsibility for his actions. The Bible affirms the realities of human accountability and of human sin. Historical determinism denies both.

We must reject not only the deterministic view of history, however, but also the humanistic “Great Men” philosophy – at least if it is understood to mean that man can single handedly change the course of history. For it is indeed Christ, not man, who is in control of history. And it is to Him that every power – “Great Men” as well as “social forces,” and whatever other causal factors there may be – is subject. Once more, that does not mean that man is not responsible. Nor does it mean that individuals cannot and do not make a difference. They can and they do; God created human beings who received real talents, and who were given a real task, and who will be judged on how they used their talents and fulfilled their task. The doctrines of divine providence and human responsibility may be hard to reconcile by human logic, they are nevertheless what the Bible teaches. And they are accepted by faith.

The “Great Man” philosophy in its unqualified form is rejected not only by Christians, but also by most secular historians. They reject it because it goes against the evidence. When historians look at periods of great change – whether it is the advent of Christianity or the coming of the Reformation, the outbreak of wars and revolutions or the rise of ideologies – they are always able to show that the times were ripe for these events. Even those historians who believe most ardently in man's freedom admit that no human being, however talented, is able to change history by himself. The times must cooperate.

Gorbachev's Role←⤒🔗

This was true also in Gorbachev's career. He himself admitted it in his resignation speech when he drew attention to the critical situation he inherited in 1985. That situation dictated drastic changes, and Gorbachev was not the only one to realize it. He could enlist the support of many, especially among the post-war generation, who agreed with his programme. But it remains true that it took a man of ability and vision, and also of great courage, to take the lead in executing that programme.

Gorbachev indeed made a difference. If a person without his courage, possibly even a member of the old guard, had gained the post of general secretary in 1985, it is more than likely that the Soviet system and empire would have hobbled on for some time and that their fall, when it came (as inevitably it had to), would have been much more violent than it has been. When great empires fall, they often do so with a lot of noise and bloodshed, and they usually take a long time dying. The decline and fall of the Soviet empire came about relatively quietly and also relatively quickly. At least that seems to be the picture so far, but the process of disintegration has not yet been completed. A lot can go wrong yet, both in the former Soviet Union and in East-Central Europe. It will be some time before the final balance can be made up.

Too Little and Too Late?←⤒🔗

According to some pundits Gorbachev's place in history depends on what the future is going to bring. If the new Commonwealth holds and stability returns, they say, he will probably be considered one of history's great statesmen: the leader who made all these positive changes possible. If, on the other hand, the disintegration continues, civil war spreads, and civil unrest gives rise to political adventurism, he will be judged a failure, one who indeed began the process of change but was unable to bring it to a good conclusion, and who left the country (and possibly the world) in much greater danger than he found it. Several of his critics, at home and abroad, have already decided that, at best, his epitaph will be: The man who did too little too late.

There is some truth in this. Gorbachev could be exasperatingly slow, and often his reforms stopped half-way. He introduced democracy to the Soviet peoples but continued to fear it, and never had his own position legalized by popular vote. He insisted that the country's economic problems could only be solved by the introduction of a market economy, but he kept postponing it and losing precious time, year after year. Above all, he underestimated the forces of nationalism, and the depth of the hatred against the Soviet Union, a hatred that all the peoples of the Union, including the Russians, had in common.

Gorbachev was, of course, in good company here, particularly when we look at the West. As long as the Soviet Union has existed, its western admirers have been many and vocal. They dominated the media and included many religious leaders and the majority of intellectuals. If you wanted to count, to be fashionable, you had to be a leftist and talk the Soviet Union up (and America down). Still well-known is the reaction to the description Ronald Reagan once gave of the Soviet Union when he called it “the evil empire.” His statement led to a massive counter-attack by the western media, which called it a typical example of reactionary rhetoric and right-wing self-righteousness.

It has only recently become politically correct to condemn the Soviet Union. On an American news programma this past Christmas a Democrat, a foreign policy adviser to former president Jimmy Carter, was asked to explain why Gorbachev had failed to keep the old Union together. It struck me that this Democrat used the same terms as the Republican Ronald Reagan: the Soviet peoples hated the Soviet Union, he said, because it was one of the two truly evil states that the 20th century had produced (the other one being Hitler Germany) – and Gorbachev's refusal to see this had doomed his efforts on behalf of the Union from the very start. This time no one objected to the terminology.

Intercession and Thanksgiving←⤒🔗

Gorbachev's critics have a point. Gorbachev's communist convictions more than once blinkered him, and the magnitude of his task overwhelmed him. But then, it was a gigantic, indeed a superhuman task, which would have overwhelmed any statesman, including Gorbachev's populist rivals. To put the blame for whatever may still go wrong in the former Soviet Union on Gorbachev, and, in the process, to deny his achievements, would be unfair. It would also be an act of gross ingratitude, not only toward Gorbachev, but also toward the Lord of history, who in Gorbachev gave much not only to the Soviet peoples but to us all.

We have been commanded to offer intercessions and thanksgivings for those who are in authority – for our own government leaders and for those of other nations. That includes Boris Yeltsin and all the leaders of what used to be the Soviet republics. These men face a dauntingly difficult task, and their failures threaten to have dire consequences, both nationally and internationally. We may not forget to intercede for them. But neither should we forget to give thanks for what, in God's mercy and providence, we have received in the man they replaced.