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One cannot help revisiting the record of the last leader of the Soviet Union in the light of the action of his distant successor, Vladimir Putin: the man who ended the Cold War disappears when confrontation makes a comeback.
But who really was Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on August 30?
Unquestionably, "a major player in the end of the Cold War, in a certain democratic and economic liberalization of the USSR, then in the fall of the Berlin Wall which enabled the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to engage along the path of democracy, the rule of law and the market economy”, explains the historian of communism Stéphane Courtois.
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For many Russians, he was rather the gravedigger of the Soviet empire while the peoples of Eastern Europe, then under the yoke of Moscow, perceived him as an involuntary liberator"
, adds in our columns the journalist and historian Thierry Wolton.
Gorbachev was a bit of all of these...
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