Mikhaïl Gorbachev.

[Colin C No.3]

Passed away today aged 91.

I wonder how history will remember a Russian President who despite giving the Russian people more ‘personal freedom’ than they’d ever experienced before with his policy of ‘glasnost’, ultimately paid the price for holding out his hand for peace with the west.

As the Soviet Union broke up under his Premiership the country was on its knees economically & ‘castrated’ militarily after Brezhnev’s ill advised invasion of Afghanistan.

The west could have stepped in with aid at this point in order to keep this ‘new Russia’ on the path Gorbachev envisaged, not another country with western style capitalism, but one that could look back at the horrors of Stalinism & say ‘never again’. But the west ‘missed’ this opportunity & in doing so allowed the seeds of discontent to grow as Russians once again formed queues for bread & essentials opening up ‘the path’ to disgruntled ex Soviet military, politicians & a certain KGB/FSB officer who used this ‘stalemate’ for the Russian people to promise a better way….the old way, when the USSR now Russia sat at the ‘top table’.

Putin & Gorbachev had little time for one another. No doubt Putin saw him as a ‘spent force’, someone he could point a finger at & say ‘look at what we have achieved now we no longer suck up to the west’.

I never in my lifetime thought I would witness the fall of the ‘Berlin Wall’.

After the Cuban missile ‘stand off’, I thought I would never witness the dread of a nuclear catastrophe happening.

Never has the term ‘you reap what you sow’ had such reticence as it has in recent months.

[BillyStubbsTears]

I think the West not pouring aid into Russia in the early 90s will be seen as one of the Great Mistakes of History.

Clinton was more concerned with putting the Peace Dividend into American pockets. Things could have been so, so different.