On 7 December 1988, in New York, Gorbachev addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. He announced the withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union also released almost all of its political prisoners. The main sensation, however, was the speech’s ideological message. Gorbachev proposed a new world order based not on ideology, but on the „all-human interests“ of cooperation and integration. This was a rejection of the Cold War order based on antagonism between the USSR and the USA and their respective allies. It was also a rejection of the Marxist-Leninist world view, based on „class struggle“ and the inevitability of communist triumph. The General Secretary declared a principle of renunciation of any form of violence, any use of force in international affairs. Chernyaev, the main drafter of Gorbachev’s UN address, considered it represented not only an ideological revolution, but also a possible farewell „to the status of a world global superpower.“ In essence, the leader of the Soviet superpower proposed to the Western powers an end to the Cold War; the Soviet Union was ready to join all international organizations as a partner.

The address stemmed from what Gorbachev had been calling since 1986 a „new political thinking.“ It was a mix of his neo-Leninist hubris, breathtaking idealism, and abhorrence of nuclear confrontation. Against the background of Stalin’s cynical Realpolitik, Khrushchev’s brinkmanship, and Brezhnev’s peace-through-strength détente, Gorbachev’s project came as a complete breakthrough. It was not a clever camouflage for the start of Soviet geopolitical retrenchment and retreat, as some Western critics asserted. It was a deliberate choice of a new vision to replace the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet geopolitical power. As such, it was probably the most ambitious example of ideological thinking in foreign affairs since Woodrow Wilson had declared his Fourteen Points at the end of World War I. It was this vision that made Gorbachev, and not Ronald Reagan or other Western leaders, a truly key actor in ending the Cold War.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 43-44.

Zubok is not kind to Gorbachev, ascribing the Soviet Union’s collapse to financial catastrophe caused by Gorbachev’s hubris, idealism, gross miscalculations. When I posted a video of Gorbachev’s December 25, 1991 resignation speech on a Russian subreddit people there echoed Zubok’s book reviewers on Goodreads.com with repeated versions of „fuck Gorbachev!“ This makes Zubok’s couple paragraphs above all the more striking, and increases my own interest in researching the begged question „what if?“ 🤔