Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a Russian and Soviet politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union.
Mikhail Gorbachev Obituary
Mikhail Gorbachev, who died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration.
It was not the objective he set himself when he was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist party in March 1985, nor did he predict or plan the way the cold war would end, the hemorrhaging of the Communist party, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany or the break-up of the Soviet Union itself.
What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a process of reform and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to spin out of control. The great facilitator, he carried on, even to the point of resigning with dignity as his power faded away.
In the aftermath of his downfall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the west to sneer at Gorbachev as “just another communist at heart”.
He was called a failure because he had not been willing to liberalize state-controlled prices, privatize industry and open the Soviet economy to outside forces as fast as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s rightwing western advisers wanted. He was ridiculed for trying to “reform” communism when he should have recognized that it was dead.