How Much Credit Should History Give Mikhail Gorbachev?

Commentary
Upon meeting Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time in 1984, just prior to his becoming general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described him as “a man we can do business with.”
Over the course of the 1980s, the world would come to know Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of the USSR, as the architect of glasnost and perestroika, words that entered the everyday English political lexicon, meaning “openness” and “restructuring.” He hoped these domestic policies would breathe new life into the Soviet Union’s anaemic economy, remake the political system, and loosen some civil restrictions during warming relations with the West….