He was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev – the man who made Glasnost (transparency) and Perestroika (economic reform) household words far beyond the Soviet Union he fought to reform. To the young people I watched greet him hungrily in East Germany in 1989 as a symbol that change was possible, he was simply “Gorby,” a projection of hopes for reforms which would prove impossible inside the Communist straitjacket, but a projection of hope and optimism.
To world leaders in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he was a man (as she put it) “We can do business with”. He was able to negotiate across the ideological lines of the late Cold War and clink glass in the evening, telling stories of his childhood and path to power in the country and system he believed in as an ambitious young Communist, but where the power he inherited over Soviet communism and its dominions was crumbling from within.
