The death of Mikhail Gorbachev last night marks the end of an extraordinary time in world history, when the apparently inexorable changes that followed the Second World War were undone. He was the man who, more than anyone, drew back the Iron Curtain.
As leader, Mr Gorbachev broke up the Soviet Union but he was also responsible for the collapse of Communist rule in one East European country after another. By eschewing the so-called Brezhnev doctrine, whereby the Soviet Union reserved the right to intervene in satellite Communist states, as it had done catastrophically in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, he made possible the advance of democracy.
