Tributes to former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday, emphasised his crucial role in ending the Cold War and reducing the threat of nuclear Armageddon posed by the arms race between the superpowers.
But the occasion also prompted warnings that some of the good risked being undone by the leader of today’s Russia, Vladimir Putin.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Gorbachev as a ‘courageous reformer’.
Scholz said: ‘His policy allowed Germany to unify and for the Iron Curtain to disappear. Thanks to Gorbachev, Russia had the opportunity to establish democracy, but he died at a time when democracy failed in Russia and President Putin opened new rifts in Europe.’
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the former Soviet leader as someone who changed the world for the better.
‘When you look at what he did to make Europe whole, and free, and to give freedom to the countries of the former Soviet Union, it was a quite extraordinary thing. Of course, Mikhail Gorbachev was one of those people who triggered a series of changes that perhaps he didn’t anticipate. Maybe he paid his own political price for it.
‘But when history is written he will be I think one of the authors of fantastic change for the better in the world.’
Johnson added: ‘What I worry about today is that the current leadership in Moscow is intent on undoing the good Gorbachev did and is intent on a revenge-driven attempt to recreate that Soviet Empire.’
He believed Gorbachev would have viewed the ‘tragedy’ in Ukraine as ‘unthinkable, unwarranted and irrational’.
US President Joe Biden called Gorbachev ‘a man of remarkable vision’.
‘When he came to power, the Cold War had gone on for nearly 40 years and communism for even longer, with devastating consequences,’ he said, adding that Gorbachev had mustered the courage to embrace democratic reforms and nuclear disarmament.
‘These were the acts of a rare leader – one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it. The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people.’
French President Emmanuel Macron said Gorbachev’s ‘commitment to peace in Europe changed our common history’.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said the 91-year-old ‘shaped the rapprochement between East and West after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe’.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that the people of Europe, as well as Russians, owed the last Soviet leader a great debt of gratitude.
Speaking to the BBC, Kissinger lauded Gorbachev’s ‘great service to humanity’.
Veteran BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson described Gorbachev as ‘a decent, well intentioned, principled man who tried to rescue the unrescuable’, adding: ‘It wasn’t his fault things went so wrong.’
[Image: RIA Novosti archive, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18134961]