Gorbachev, the man who broke the system's shackles

Berlin: At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin this evening, one of the defining figures of the last century's history will sit down to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event in which he played a key role.

In the audience will be Lech Walesa and Hillary Clinton, invited to listen to Daniel Barenboim conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin.

But the star guest will be Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader under whose leadership the Cold War in eastern and central Europe was brought to an end.

If a sense of his importance to the events of 1989 is required, it was supplied last week by Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian, who described Gorbachev's "breathtaking renunciation of the use of force" while Soviet leader as "a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history".

The reminder feels long overdue. For there is a conundrum concerning Gorbachev: it is why a living figure of such historic moment appears to have receded so far in our memory in comparison with contemporaries such as Nelson Mandela or Ronald Reagan.

The truth is that Gorbachev meant, and means, more than that. Not the Gorbachev of now, but the ‘Gorby' of then: architect of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring), two Russian words that for a while seemed on every news bulletin.

The builder of bridges with the West, renouncer of the Stalinist notions of the use of force, who, through his actions and inactions, changed the world. The man with whom Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could do business.

Born in Privolnoye, near Stavropol in 1931, Gorbachev's was a remarkable rise. Driving combine harvesters in his teens, he went on to read law at Moscow State University where he met his wife, Raisa.

The years that would follow, after he joined the Communist party, were marked by a precocious advance: youngest of the provincial party chiefs; youngest member of the ruling politburo.

It was Gorbachev's accession to the position of general-secretary of the Communist party in 1985 that finally would unleash the ideas he had already been playing with during his rapid rise to power.

It was not defined, as some misunderstood it, by a desire to emulate the West. Far from it. Instead, what he desired was to make more efficient and liberal a party that had lost its way.

Gorbachev quickly grasped the nettle of the war in Afghanistan, prevailing on the central committee that decided in principle that Soviet forces should be withdrawn.

In 1988, he would also suspend the deployment of SS-20 missiles in Europe and later propose that both the Americans and Russians should cut their nuclear arsenals in half.

And it was not only the use of force that Gorbachev was uncomfortable with. "Much of the atmosphere that Stalin created still existed and people were afraid of talking to the government," he explained recently.

"We said very directly, ‘Our people are free to speak their minds, free to write, free to assemble and discuss.' And what glasnost meant was that the entire society was set in motion."