In Ukraine, Mr. Putin is fighting in the shadows of the empire whose end Mr. Gorbachev presided over, having started a war that has killed thousands in the name of restoring Moscow’s dominance over what it claims to be Russian lands. But Mr. Putin’s battle to reverse Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy extends beyond territorial control to the personal and political freedoms that the last Soviet president ushered in — and that the Kremlin is now fast unraveling.
“All of Gorbachev’s reforms are now zero, in ashes, in smoke,” a friend of Mr. Gorbachev’s, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview. “This was his life’s work.”
Mr. Gorbachev, who has died at age 91, was still in power when Mr. Venediktov’s freewheeling liberal radio station, Echo of Moscow, first went on the air in 1990 and came to symbolize Russia’s newfound freedoms. After Mr. Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February, the Kremlin forced the station to shut down.
And Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper that Mr. Gorbachev used his Nobel Peace Prize money to help found in the early 1990s, was forced to suspend publication in March, threatened by a new wartime censorship law.
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