Winning the gratitude of the world with his failures, Mikhail Gorbachev became a hero through his participation in the liquidation of the political system that he tried to save through reforms.. He was remembered as a visionary because he did not clearly see the incurable systemic disease of socialism: it was unable to cope with the dispersion of information in a developed country..

Like Christopher Columbus, who accidentally discovered the New World, Gorbachev achieved greatness thanks to his misunderstanding of where he was going at all, writes American journalist and Pulitzer laureate George Will in an article for the Washington Post..

Gorbachev's two uncles and aunt died during the Holodomor in 1932-1933 organized by Joseph Stalin. Both of his grandfathers suffered during the Great Terror. One of them recalled: the investigator broke his arms, severely beat him, and then wrapped him in a wet casing and put him on a hot stove.. In Gorbachev: His Life and Times, Amherst College political scientist William Taubman quotes the Soviet leader about how, as a child during World War II, he found the remains of Red Army soldiers:.

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Taubman suggested that perhaps this experience could explain Gorbachev's greatest virtue, his " However, when the head of the British Labor Party, Neil Kinnock, raised the issue during a meeting with the leader of the USSR about the imprisoned dissident Natan Sharansky, he answered obscenely, “cursing such “gamnuks” and spies like Sharansky”.

President Ronald Reagan, rejecting the subtleties of political detente, stepped up the rhetoric and military tension. In 1983, he called the USSR " Through the Strategic Defense Initiative, he launched a high-tech challenge to the USSR, 30% of whose hospitals had no bathrooms.. Reagan sent lethal military aid to forces fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan. When Gorbachev withdrew troops from there, "

The political scientist called Gorbachev " He also noted that the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the failed government response to it dispelled any illusions the leader of the USSR had about the absolutely rotten Soviet system.. A French official said that once Gorbachev was late for a reception at the Kremlin. He justified himself by explaining that he was “trying to solve an urgent problem in the agricultural sector. When I asked when this problem appeared, he replied with a slight smirk: “In 1917.”.

Secretary of State George Shultz explained to Gorbachev in 1987 that the world was moving from an industrial age to an information age.. Therefore, the fundamental Marxist opposition between capital and the working class becomes obsolete.. Because “we are entering a world in which the most important capital is human capital, that is, that people know how freely they exchange information and knowledge”. Gorbachev's enduring legacy may be that tyranny in China decided to draw certain lessons from the fall of both the USSR itself and its last leader..

“When Xi Jinping has nightmares, the ghost he sees is Mikhail Gorbachev,” political scientist Graham Allison said..

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He added that the Chinese leader once named three catastrophic mistakes of the Soviet leader. First, he loosened political control over society before he reformed the economy.. Secondly, he allowed the Communist Party to be corrupt. And thirdly, he "

In 1988, as France prepared to celebrate the two-centenary of the revolution, Gorbachev brazenly decided to chastise the UN: " Only two? But it was the American Revolution that unleashed a passion for freedom based on respect for natural rights.. The USSR, created by brute force and held together by the iron hoops of bureaucracy, never enjoyed the legitimacy that the United States achieved.. He failed to achieve such a voluntary unification of a culturally diverse population.

The fragile structure of the USSR fell apart, despite the fact that Gorbachev tried to save it. His reputation is based on a global amnesia that erased this truth.. When Gorbachev was promoted to General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he boasted that he had read all 55 volumes of Vladimir Lenin's works, telling a friend: " About Lenin - the architect of the first totalitarian system, who shed rivers of blood - Gorbachev said in 2006: "