This is not another pipe-sucking reassessment of Mikhail Gorbachev's failed attempt to democratise the Soviet Union thirty years ago. He wasn't actually trying to do that anyway; he was attempting to save the Soviet Union and Communism by civilising and softening the harsh Bolshevik dictatorship that had prevailed since 1917.
Gorbachev was hated by most older Russians because the Soviet Union, the country they were born into, broke apart on his watch. His current successor, Vladimir Putin, is now waging a war to put it back together, but Gorbachev, Mr Putin and most other Russians have all made the same category error. They thought the Soviet Union was a country.
It wasn't. It was an empire, fundamentally no different from the half-dozen other European empires that carved most of the world up between them in the preceding few centuries -- or indeed, from the hundreds of other empires that had preceded them in the 5,000 years of "mass" civilisations.
