You would be hard-pressed to find a more significant weekend in the political history of the 20th century post-war world than the first three days of December 1989.
It was then that US President George W. Bush Snr and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev landed in Malta for a three-day summit which would ultimately lead to the declaration of the end of the Cold War.
It is the defining moment, particularly, of the leadership of Gorbachev, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 91 and was laid to rest yesterday.
That famous summit saw history turn full circle: where on 2 February 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Malta before heading on to Yalta, where the battlelines for what would turn out to be the Cold War were drawn – Bush and Gorbachev met again in Malta to bring the Cold War to an end.
It was Gorbachev who prompted a thawing in the relationship between the US and the USSR, with his two key policies – namely “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring).
They were policies prompted by something of an acceptance of the democratisation of the notoriously hard-line Communist regime. The sudden change in tack prompted an undermining of the central one-party state that had such a controlling hold on the Eastern Bloc, and that, coupled with increases in nationalistic sentiment, resulted in a widespread movement which culminated in the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
It is against that backdrop that Gorbachev arrived in a stormy Malta on the first weekend of December 1989.
The choice of Malta as the venue for the summit was a symbolic one: Malta is located in the centre of the Mediterranean, where East meets West and North meets South. With neutrality enshrined in the Constitution by that point, it was to be the perfect backdrop for the historic moment.
Then Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami had told The Malta Independent, back in 2009, of how he received a call in around mid-November from the US Ambassador to Malta asking for an urgent meeting: “I did not know what had prompted it, but when the Soviet Ambassador turned up as well and they explained that Malta had been chosen as the neutral venue for the [Bush-Gorbachev] summit, I remember the exact words I said to them: ‘With open arms, they will be welcome’.”
That came to be the case – despite the best efforts of the stormy weather, which was a particular issue because many of the meetings took place on ships anchored off the coast of Marsaxlokk. The awful weather in fact gave rise to the moniker the “Seasick Summit” among international media.
The all-important meetings ultimately took place aboard the Maksim Gorky, a Soviet cruise ship which had been chartered to a West German tour company, and in a joint press conference, the first ever between a US and Soviet leader, at the end of the summit, both world leaders decreed an end to the Cold War.
“The world is leaving one epoch and entering another,” were the words which echoed across the world when uttered by Gorbachev.
“We are at the beginning of a long road to a lasting, peaceful era. The threat of force, mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle should all be things of the past," he said.
“We can realise a lasting peace and transform the East-West relationship to one of enduring cooperation. That is the future that President Gorbachev and I began right here in Malta,” Bush Snr replied.
With Bush Snr having passed away in 2018 – ironically 29 years to the day of when the Malta Summit began – and with Gorbachev now also passing away on Tuesday, there is a significance in that the authors of the end of a period, that defined the geopolitical scenario which two whole generations had to live through.
It brings us to Gorbachev’s legacy.
His refusal to intervene militarily in 1989 across the Eastern Block, as the USSR had done in the past when countries it occupied, such as Hungary, got ideas of independence, facilitated what would be the end of the Cold War.
His efforts in that regard have brought him praise in the West, but derision in Russia – particularly in the present day. So much is the disapproval towards his legacy, that the country has devolved back into a dictatorship and that its current strongman leader Vladimir Putin did not attend Gorbachev’s funeral, which took place on Saturday.
Regardless however, Malta and Gorbachev will share an unlikely connection of great significance in the history books – something which no debate on his legacy can erase.