A peaceful yet radical social transformer: Mikhail Gorbachev leaves a blazing legacy | Archie Brown

No western leader could have predicted his progressive reforms. But war between his country and Ukraine was a devastating blow

Mikhail Gorbachev was the most significant political leader globally of the second half of the 20th century and one of the greatest reformers in Russian history. By the time he resigned as president of the USSR during its final throes, he had played the decisive role in making Russia a freer country than it had ever been. The new tolerance and liberties at home, together with the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, emboldened the peoples of eastern and central Europe to send their communist rulers packing and to reject Moscow's overlordship. As Gorbachev was also the most pacific of all Soviet - perhaps of all Russian - leaders, not a shot was fired by a Soviet soldier while the Warsaw Pact countries achieved independence from 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell in November that year, or when Germany was reunited in 1990.

There is a popular fallacy in the west that the Soviet Union had reached crisis point by 1985, that the Communist party's politburo chose Gorbachev as general secretary because he was a reformer, and that therefore he had no option but to undertake radical changes. An authoritarian regime is in crisis when its laws and commands are no longer obeyed, when there is persistent mass protest and, in particular, when such social unrest is accompanied by open splits within the political elite.