Gorbachev and King Lear

So I am reading King Lear for my next class, and I am tortured by this association of Soviet Union/Gorbachev with the King. I know it is not the most profound reading of either play or the current events, but it is relevant and urgent, nevertheless.

The foolish king gave up everything to his two bullshitting daughters, while insisted on keeping "the name and all the addition to a King" which is of course, impossible, without the land and theforce to back it up. As his daughter, Goneril, observed, dismissively: "The old man that still would manage those authorities that he hath given away."

Same with Gorbachev who gave away half Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and then all the Soviet Republics and still wanted to retain the title of superpower, backed up by nothing. At certain moment Reagan (what a Shakespearean name) almost convinced him in giving up the nukes, which would have been the end of Russia as we know it.

Of course, the sisters now feel at ease to remind Lear that he is now so insignificant, that he doesn’t his knights or few other privileges. The West does the same with Russia: why do you need "near abroad," why do you need spheres of influence or military bases, what do you care about bombing of Serbia? You are an old feeble-minded man, so just get on with the program. And be happy with your old age, and the little dinner that we would provide you. There is always enough football clubs and London flats for your corrupt oligarchy to buy, why do you need anything else?

Russia and Russians still have to deal with the legacy of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsi’s folly, and with the fact that they are continually reprimanded, as if they were school children, by all those who benefited from Russia's generosity, naivete, or lack of wisdom. By all those, who still feel the right to lecture Russia, and construct the narrative any way they want, like Goneril does to Lear: "Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires; men so disordered, so debosh'd, and bold that this our court, infected with their manners, shows like a riotous inn."

So what if for Lear, these men are "of choice and rarest parts, that all particulars of duty know." In fact, judging by Kent, it is Lear who is correct, but it is Goneril who defines who is who, and not Lear, it is the US and French, and British representatives in UN who tells us what is going in Syria, or Ukraine, or anywhere else in the world, and not the actual participants or people who might have a different take on the events.

Of course, we know that all these lying, greedy, and treacherous daughters and sons did not really benefited from their lies in the long run. In their greed, they began to devour each other. And that's what is clearly in store for the west. When continuied with its lying and treacherous policies, that would inevitably self-destruct.

Yet, I hope that today's Russia did learn from the last two decades as well, and that now, every deal it makes, would have mechanisms of backing it up, so that every time it encounters the treachery (as they did in Syria when US coalition just bombed Russians and its Syrian allies just for the hell of it, and then began to scream about Russian barbarism), it would have enough knights left to maintain its authority.

If we trust Shakespeare, the alternative is too scary: pain, corpses, tears, and curses: "Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror?"