Someone with a special affinity with Lithuania might be interested in this...

http://www.euronews.com/2022/01/13/mikhail-gorbachev-accused-of-war-crimes-by-six-lithuanian-citizens

Did he end "the Soviet Union's post war domination of eastern Europe" or was incapable of stopping the collapse of the Soviet Empire? He certainly tried to stop it.

Gorbachev visited China in 1989. "Deng Xiaoping thought Mikhail Gorbachev was an idiot."

Dear Paul,

Mikhail Gorbachev was a divisive, often detested figure in
Russia and also the state he led - the Soviet Union, no
longer exists. For which people like Putin, et al can not
forgive him or forget.

However Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former member of the Russian
Parliament and a Kremlin critic lauded Gorbachev for
freeing hundreds of millions of people from tyranny and
for drastically reducing the number of nuclear warheads.

He said Gorbachev had given Russia a chance to be free.
"It's not his fault we couldn't use it,"said Ryzhkov.

As a person of Lithuanian ancestry - I am grateful to
Gorbachev for allowing Lithuanioans to vote with their
feet as a result of his policies of - Glasnost and Perestroika.

"Deng Xiaoping thought Mikhail Gorbachev was an idiot". If Deng thought Gorbachev was an idiot, what did he think of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, now there was a couple of warmongering fruit loops straight out of the box. If he was alive today, what would Deng make of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, me thinks he would call them the new "Three Stooges'.

Hi Paul,

When Michael Reagan attended the 2004 funeral of his
father former US President Ronald Reagan the man sitting
behind him, he recalls, was the last leader of the Eoviet
Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

" What I most remember is him telling me that every time
my father and him met, my father would always end every
meeting with, " If it's God's will," and Mikhail
Gorbachev would say to me, " I would look around the
room to see if God was there."

Also the assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev by Margaret
Thatcher became international news when she said that she -
"could do business together."

Lets also not forget that in 1987 Reagan and Gorbachev signed
the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).
The landmark agreement proposed to eliminate all intermediate
and short range ground-based missiles and launchers from'
Europe.

I have a special personal connection with the Gorbachev premiership. On 10/3/85 I landed in Moscow. In those days I regularly visited for business purposes. Normally I was met at the airport by a representative of the company I was visiting to ensure I got to the hotel - being a lone westerner in Moscow wasn't always safe. But this time no one met me so I made my own way to the hotel.

After a few hours I still hadn't seen any of my business partners so I decided to walk to their office which was just off Marx Prospekt. But as I walked I kept coming across detours and ended up hopelessly lost. In the end I jumped in a taxi who got me as close to the hotel as he could.

12 hours later I was finally contacted and advised that Chernenko had died and the entire nation was in a period of official mourning. All meetings would be delayed for three days. I was staying in a hotel called The National which is just off Red Square. As such I had a birds-eye view of all the preparations for the funeral and the actual funeral. ( on the day of the funeral I was informed that I'd have someone in my room -probably KGB - to ensure I didn't take any photos. He was there for 6 hours and we shared more bottles of vodka than I'd care to remember).

My Russian contacts were exceedingly excited that Gorbachev would succeed Chernenko, thinking he was a new broom who would rejuvenate the USSR. Even in those days they were making plans as to how they'd take advantage of the opening of markets. Speaking with some of my western colleagues, we felt they were being hopelessly naive as to how hard introducing free market policies would be in a society that had been sovietised for 70 years.

I visited Moscow and a few other cities regularly up to 1991. Each trip it was clear that the people were becoming increasingly disillusioned with Gorbachev and his policies.

Gorbachev did not develop the power to implement
his decisions. His policies were simply not put into
practice. In order to fully understand the situation
of the Gorbachev era -
one needs to know the entire economic history of
the country and how it worked. The following link
may help:

http://britannica.com/place/Russia/The-Gorbachev-era-perestroika-and-glasnost