In the last months of his life, seriously ill, Mikhail Gorbachev read Pushkin so as not to look at Russia’s war in Ukraine, not to see how the two most important heirs of the superpower he once headed were being killed. The world-historical events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago bore its mark, and Gorbachev lived long enough to see what they led to. He died on Tuesday, a few months after turning 91, leaving his shocking journey to history.

“The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union is one of the causes of the conflict in Ukraine,” Gorbachev said in a 2015, after the first phase of the conflict in Donbass, in a lengthy interview with Spiegel magazine.

A year earlier, he sent letters to US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I asked them to negotiate because the conflict in Ukraine is a threat to the whole world, and not just to Ukraine and its neighbors. My letters were a cry from the depths of my soul.”

The world learned how deeply Gorbachev believed in international peace and disarmament in 1986, when he made his first trip abroad, to Paris, as the new secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Sociable, accessible, completely different from his “wooden” predecessors, he told his French colleague François Mitterrand that he intended to abolish medium-range nuclear missiles if US President Ronald Reagan agreed to this. At the Reykjavik summit, Gorbachev tried to persuade Reagan to go even further by jointly completely dismantling their nuclear arsenals.

A staunch pacifist, he tried to convince Ronald Reagan that the US and the USSR would jointly completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

This was not the only opportunity that the short stay of an idealist politician at the helm of the Soviet Union opened up to mankind. In 1990-1991, when the collapse was underway, he proposed a new European security architecture “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” He believed the repeated assurances of everyone, especially the Americans, that if he accepted the membership of a united Germany in NATO, NATO would not move its borders “an inch” to the east, and agreed to a peaceful withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany.

Gorbachev spent the last three decades of his life lashing out at the few who wanted to listen to him – the majority in Russia turned their backs on him, blaming him for the ills of the collapse, while for Westerners the value of drug use disappeared. “In November 1990, at a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, later OSCE), we discussed a new peaceful international order. But nothing came of it, on the contrary, a dangerous winning mentality took root in America,” he said. “No Russian president will tolerate this.”

In his last article in 2021, Gorbachev acknowledged “delusions, mistakes, but also successes.” “If I had a chance to start over, I would do a lot of things differently. But I am convinced that historically perestroika has been a just cause.” Gorbachev was the man who gave the people of the Soviet Union freedom of speech, religion, the press, travel abroad, freed political prisoners and sought a new model of government. He could not foresee – and this is the second great naivety that many Russians do not forgive him – that his policies would cause such strong and such rapid tendencies to decay.

Until the end of his life, he insisted that it was not he who ruined the Soviet Union and did not conduct “shock therapy” of mass impoverishment and deprivation of state property, but his successor Boris Yeltsin. It was highly understated that in the 1990s he turned into a propagandist for Western consumer goods, but he probably would not have needed to do this if he had taken care to personally benefit from the plundering of state wealth created by the new Russian oligarchy . .

When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he donated part of his income to journalist Dmitry Muratov to create the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. “We will always remember: he loved a woman (wife Raisa, with whom he was inseparable) more than his work, put human rights above the state and valued a peaceful sky more than personal strength,” Muratov wrote. “He gave us thirty years of peace, without the threat of world and nuclear war. But the gift is over. No longer exists. And there will be no more gifts.