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Mikhail Gorbachev: How Did a Prince Among Thieves Rise To Change The World?
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Contrary to the nonsense that we were taught at school, it wasn’t Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl nor Francois Mitterand who won the cold war and brought an end to the great ‘evil empire’.
It was Mikhail Gorbachev.
Despite the usual demonization and grandstanding from the West — for those who remember Reagan’s speech — it took the most unassuming individual who rose to the very top of the Politburo, to oversee the disintegration of an empire which had run its course.
Think about it for a second.
We are talking about the communist party, which had produced some of the craziest individuals that the world has ever seen in Lenin, Trotsky, Kamanev and Zinoviev; men who weren’t averse to using extreme violence to further their ambitions and goals.
By the time Joseph Stalin took on the reins of power in the aftermath of Lenin’s demise, our man took things up several notches and slaughtered millions to shore up his position.
While it may be true that Khrushchev and Brezhnev were no near as murderous as their predecessor, Soviet Russia was still a brutally repressive state.