He ended The Cold War.
Moved the world away from nuclear war.
Permitted much truth to be told, opening up a totalitarian system.
Allowed hundreds of millions to sleep easier.
Helped us begin to rediscover hope.
But lived to see almost all of it undermined, rolled back, and destroyed, and a new imperialist tyranny installed.
And spent his last three decades disgraced, forgotten and isolated in his homeland.
Gorbachev will, however, be mourned among Russia’s increasingly suppressed liberal circles, many of whom have fled the country since the start of the war in Ukraine.
“Gorbachev is a monumental politician … There has never been such freedom in Russia as in the late 80s and early 90s. This is his merit,” wrote the veteran Russian journalist Mikhail Fishman, in one of many tributes that quickly started to pour in following the news of his death.
“We have all become orphans. But not everyone has understood it yet,” said Alexei Venediktov, a friend and the former head of the Ekho Moskvy radio station which was forced off air over its coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Gorbachev had himself helped kickstart independent Russian journalism, using part of his 1993 Nobel peace prize money to help set up the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a paper which went on to become the country’s most praised independent newspaper, shedding light on some of Russia’s darkest chapters. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta was also forced to cease its operations.
Few knew Gorbachev better than his biographer, William Taubman, who in 2017 wrote that Gorbachev’s main issue was that Russia simply had no real experience with the freedom it was being offered.
One of the last to visit Gorbachev in hospital on 30 June was the liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg.
“He gave us all freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it,” Grinberg said, after his visit to his old friend.