Gorbachev changed our world history

MIKHAIL Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union that, under his leadership, came to a bloodless end in 1991, is dead. I can well imagine that for many younger people under the age of 40 he existed only in contemporary history, a passing Head of State.

Goodness; he was so much more than that. He quietly brought about a change of direction in world history. From the time I first became aware of the world about us all, until my mid-50s, the USSR – in Russian the CCCP – dominated the ‘other’ side of the political world stage, the other side of the madness of an arms race.

Though born in 1931 and so tutored in his most impressionable years at a time of the omniscient presence of Comrade Joseph

Stalin, he surfaced into political dominance with a warm smile, a charm and twinkle in his eye and an approachability that was both infectious and possessed an intellectual reasoning – Glasnost and Perestroika – that raised eyebrows.

With his very elegant and intelligent wife Raisa he charmed the politics out of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who, to me, expressed one of the most erudite descriptions of ‘Gorby’ ever heard when she said of him: “I can do business with this man.”

What I saw of him and what

I read of him in those years of his leadership was the feeling of excitement. His gradual leading of the USSR along new roads towards removing East-West tensions. The expression used by those of dignified understanding, experienced foreign affairs politicians, would describe a new “rapprochement” emerging. A constrained, cautious coming together of erstwhile opponents. Russia was doing political and strategic business with the West.

The old Soviet hierarchy were suspicious, they felt unsafe on their feet. They took him under house arrest and the cowboys had a great time when he was freed; a bull of a drunken fool, Boris Yeltsin emerged and was taken for a ride by his new Western friends. Weakened, he quietly left office – the room in the Kremlin that had been used by every First Secretary since Lenin. And then the gangsters took over and raped the nation... We sadly witness the death of a friend.

Don Frampton Newton Abbot, Devon