Russia-Ukraine Flash Report 30 AUG 2022 17:00 PDT - Mikhail Gorbachev, Dead, Age 91 (Patreon)

Mikhail Gorbachev is vilified in modern Russia. His reforms which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, are seen as the root cause of all of the current problems in modern Russia.

Our favorite FSB Colonel, wanted war criminal, and Kremlin pariah, Igor "Girkin" Strelkov, wrote the following - eulogy.

"This creature should not wish for eternal disgrace - he acquired it forever. It makes no sense to curse this creature - contempt is the best that he deserved and deserves.

The only thing I'm curious about is whether he remembered the Soul before his death and tried at least before his death to rethink and re-evaluate his life? Or did he leave like Vladimir Volfovich - without confession and Communion?

Comments turned off - in my opinion - the deceased is not worth it for normal Russian (and not only) people to discuss his death on my page. For me, even dead, he will remain none other than Gorby the Jew."

The fall of the Berlin Wall led a KGB agent in Dresden to be filled with rage at the “stab in the back.” That mid-level agent would become the de facto dictator of Russia and start a war responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people in less than six months. His name is Vladimir Putin.

Gorbachev came from an ethnic Russian father and an ethnic Ukrainian mother. His family was devout Orthodox Christians, and he was baptized in secret during the darkest days of Stalin’s pre-World War II rule. Both of his grandfathers were arrested during the Stalin purges of 1937 and tortured by the secret police. He spent four months living under German occupation in World War II. His father was a soldier in the Great Patriotic War, was wounded, and sent home. He studied law, became a lawyer, and moved up the political power chain.

By 1978 his ascension to power in the Soviet Union was well on its way. He was named the Central Committee’s Secretariat for Agriculture, just in time for three years of disastrous crop production from 1979 to 1981. He determined that agricultural decision-making had become overly centralized and managed from the top town instead of the bottom. He believed that the farmers working the fields had a better understanding of managing production than leaders in the Kremlin.

In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died, which started a period of revolving-door leadership for the Communist Party. The line between the old Soviet Union of the Stalin era and a more reformed Soviet Union was beginning to blur. Yuri Andropov was declared the Secretary-General but was already in poor health. Gorbachev was a close ally of Andropov, who leaned on Gorbachev to fulfill some duties of the Secretary-General. Andropov lived for only 14 months, and there was a push to name Gorbachev, the new leader. However, the old-school leaders of the Politburo believed he was too young and named Konstantin Cherneko as the Secretary-General. Cherneko lived for 13 months.

When Gorbachev was named Secretary-General in March 1985, the Soviet Union was already in collapse. He inherited the failed war in Afghanistan, bleeding the treasury dry, and had now unpopular on the home front. Social and economic reforms that started in Poland had swept into Hungary and Yugoslavia. Rubik’s Cube was in the hands of 200 million people beyond the Iron Curtain. The Yugo, a Yugoslavian economy car “reflecting the cutting edge of  Serbo-Croatian technology,” had already been introduced at the Los Angeles Auto Show in 1984 in red, white, and blue colors. East Germany was a zombie state already itching for reform and reunification. On April 26, 1986, everything changed.

3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible

The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant was commissioned between 1978 and 1984. The echoes of the Stalin era had deeply embedded a culture of fear and corruption in Soviet society. Leadership roles weren’t based on experience or merit of skill but political connections. During the plant’s construction, aggressive deadlines were set for testing and certification. Missing these deadlines would mean not only the loss of bonus pay (how ironic) but potentially the loss of title if the Communist Party leaders in the Kremlin were dissatisfied. Russian leaders were told that the reactors had met all their testing requirements when they hadn’t been done.

Almost all power plants receive the electricity to run them from a different power plant. This way, if the plant's generators shut down or fail, electrical power is still available. In the event of a catastrophic failure, diesel generators or jet turbines that run on natural gas can switch on to maintain power to run the plant. In the case of Chornobyl, the diesel generators needed over a minute to create a sufficient amount of electricity to run the plant. The design called for a flywheel within the turbine to continue to spin at sufficient speed to maintain plant operations during that period. Reactor four had repeatedly failed the test. The Kremlin was told that testing was completed and passed when reactor four was commissioned. Plant managers wanted to check the box. If anyone dug for the paperwork, they would have the proof.

The turbine failed the test in 1982 and was quietly modified. It failed the test again in 1984. In 1985, the equipment to monitor the test failed, yielding no results. On April 25, operators attempted the test again. The test was delayed for over 12 hours, and the plant was operated in a non-optimal state. There was a shift change, and now an inexperienced team of engineers unfamiliar with the test procedure was responsible.

Although the reactor was operating well out of the safe margins to do the test, operators proceeded forward. Additional water pumps were activated to keep the reactor cool enough while operating at under 40% of the required power generation to run the test. The cooling system was filling with steam voids. Graphic control rods were raised manually to try and maintain the nuclear reaction. The minimum safe limit was 15 of the 211 rods; operators were unaware that only one rod was left because the monitoring systems didn’t provide real-time data.

Despite the indication that the test should not move forward, power and four pumps were disconnected. The temperature in the reactor spiked along with the power output. The water, which moderates the fusion reaction, was quickly replaced by steam. The reactor was running away. The now infamous AZ-5 button was pressed. Two hundred ten control rods started to descend at once, meant to stop the reaction, but there was a fatal flaw.

What the engineers in the control room didn’t know, what no one running the plant knew, was each control rod was tipped with boron-carbide. The tips were meant to displace water when in the down position, boosting the output of the reactor. The 210 rods simultaneously moved downward with the push of the AZ-5 button, which should have stopped the reaction. Instead, the boron carbide tips displaced more moderating water, creating a flash of power. Power output went from 200MW to 30,000MW in seconds – there was an explosion.

The fallout

During the first hours of the disaster, Gorbachev was lied to about the severity of the situation. Operators wanted to control panic, and the residents of Kyiv and Minsk were unaware of the radioactive clouds over their cities. It was a pivotal moment for Gorbachev personally and politically. He used the accident to criticize the Soviet system, poor quality of products and work, and corruption.

The disaster at Chornobyl accelerated the looming financial collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1987 he announced the withdrawal of 500,000 Soviet troops from the Eastern Bloc. The Warsaw Pact nations were now consuming news and media from beyond the Iron Curtain, and reform was sweeping the nations. The collapse of the Soviet Union was surprisingly bloodless. Only Romania and Moldova had violent transitions. Within a few years, the former Yugoslavian republics would descend into almost a decade of chaos, war, and genocide.

Gorbachev always wanted to be a reformer. As a voracious reader and a student of history, he knew even during his formative years that the vision of Lenin had been corrupted, and the Soviet state was broken, corrupt, and failed. Gorbachev always viewed himself as a reformer. Although the economic, political, and social situations forced these changes, he was dealt a bad hand when he became the General Secretary. Had Gorbachev not started the reforms and begun building economic ties with the West, the collapse would have been more severe and could have devolved into civil war.

Almost 40 years later, Vladimir Putin went from a frightened and powerless KGB agent as East Germans threatened to storm the Dresden headquarters to a dictator returning to the era of Stalinism. The work of Gorbachev was torn down before his eyes, and the last six months exposed the corruption that caused a nuclear reactor to melt down in 1986 still permeates the Russian Federation.

Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30, 2022, at the age of 91.