Defence: Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who ended the Cold War

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Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on August 30 at the age of 91. Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, forged arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War Two and bring about the reunification of Germany.

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In December 1986, Gorbachev phoned Andrei Sakharov, the most vilified dissident in the USSR. Sakharov had been languishing for seven years in internal exile in the closed city of Gorky for his condemnation of the invasion of Afghanistan. In a radical rupture with the etiquette of his predecessors, Gorbachev politely invited Sakharov to return to Moscow to “resume your patriotic work”. When Gorbachev introduced multi-candidate elections to a new Soviet legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, Sakharov became one of 2,250 new parliamentarians

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"He gave freedom to hundreds of millions of people in Russia and around it, and also half of Europe," said former Russian liberal opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky. "Few leaders in history have had such a decisive influence on their time." But Gorbachev saw his legacy wrecked late in life, as the invasion of Ukraine brought Western sanctions crashing down on Moscow, and politicians in both Russia and the West began to speak of a new Cold War. "Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life's work, freedom, was effectively destroyed by Putin," said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.