The Last Soviet

Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week at age 91, was the last president of the Soviet Union before he dissolved the federation in 1991, the once-great union of fifteen ethnic homelands no longer held together by force and the constituent states known ironically as "republics" free to go on their own.

Gorbachev is almost single-handedly credited with ending the Cold War, but it's important to remember that he spent most of the six years he led the Soviet Union trying to reform and restructure the system so that the union would stay together.  No one at the Kremlin asked any of the constituent republics what they thought of their subservient place to the dominant Russian power bloc in the Soviet government.  Lithuania didn't bother to wait to be asked.  It went ahead with secession, and the other Baltic States followed.  It was under Gorbachev that the Red Army tried to crack down on Lithuanian nationalists in January 1991.  Gorbachev wanted to end the COld War, all right, but with the Soviet Union still in place and with the Russians still in control of it.  (Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, was the only Soviet leader who was neither Russian or Ukrainian, and that was largely through the pure force of his brutal personality.)

So let's give Gorbachev credit for bringing  the threat of superpower nuclear annihilation and the era of mutually assured destruction to a close, and I'll even spot him a role in the reunification of Germany, but there's only one man who can be given credit for the liberation of Eastern Europe that ended the Cold War, and it's this great leader.