Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who tried to modernize and liberalize USSR society before overseeing the empire’s fall in 1991, died this week. Many AEI scholars at the time wrote extensively about their views him. But it was AEI scholar Jeane J. Kirkpatrick who penned this deep look at the man in a 1990 Foreign Affairs essay:

Mikhail Gorbachev is what Sidney Hook called an “event-making man”: a man whose actions transform the historical context in which he acts. He has already loosened the reins that have tightly controlled Soviet society since the Bolshevik Revolution–largely eliminating censorship, largely freeing emigration, permitting religious freedom not enjoyed in the Soviet Union since 1917, overhauling the structures of government, and providing elections with competition. . . . Obviously Gorbachev is not the only source of change in the world, in the West or in the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the late Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Sharansky, the refuseniks and generations of dissidents have articulated alternatives to the stifling official Soviet prescription and have provided models of courage and honesty. . . . But it was Gorbachev who, from the apex of the Soviet system, acted. 

Leon Aron, who joined AEI in 1992 and is a preeminent authority on Russian history and politics, has this to say about Gorbachev after his death, “By the nature of the regime he dismantled and the sheer number of people and peoples whom he freed, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev — the reformist Soviet leader who died Tuesday at 91 — may have been the greatest liberator of all time.”

In Ronald Reagan’s 1988 AEI Boyer Lecture “Freedom and Vigilance,” he discussed a meeting he had had with Gorbachev that morning in New York City. Reagan stressed the need at a very critical juncture to “remain strong and free of illusion for only by doing so can we reach out and embrace this new era and transform this hope of peace and freedom for all the world into reality.”

After decades of the Cold War, scholars at AEI were hopeful about the changes in the Soviet Union, cautious about their long-term trajectory, but they gave Gorbachev his due. Now, 30 years later, AEI scholars continue to monitor the region and the growing threat arising from Russia.

The post From the AEI Archive: Early Impressions of Gorbachev and a Final Thought appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.