Other(esp. in western world) says that he was a Revolutioner, other that he was a clown. To find the truth we must ask the ex-soviet people, they answer that he is the most unpopular politician in Russian history ever. Soviet society wasn't a free society(not that our is free), but people used to live with respect. M.G. said he is going to make a change called as "Perestroica". After that soviet people started to face the problem how to survive. Mafia rules their country and wars are common phainomenon in ex-S.U. Millions of people from eastern world,go to work like slaves to Germany,Italy,Greece,France ...... How can i say to people that blame him that they are wrong?

Thanks to Misha Gorbachov, the Soviet Union finally collapsed. May be, the main hero did not have such intentions, but that happened anyway.

Was instrumental in bringing the cold war to an end.

It took courage for Gorbachev to stand up and take the steps he took in the 1980s. He, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, took Russia and the other former Soviet countries into a new world. It's unfortunate that people like Putin (and revisionist historians) have to blur their legacy.

Gorby loves Russia, he has the map of it printed on his head..... just as bad as all those other nasty grumpy Russian presidents.........

Crook,Commie. Was looking for ways the Bio attack us when media, Reagan and Bush were saying what a great guy he was. Also said trash cans are full or bread and no one in Russia is going hungry at a time when they were running out of food and the states had to give them free wheat. Liar scumbag.

He opened the glasnost policy. He was a lot better than Nikita Kruschev and Vladmir Lenin.

Did what was right. A true visionary and, along with President Reagan, cause more change in the world in the second half of the 20th century than any other leader in Eastern Europe before him.

Communism has failed everywhere it has tried. So why not try it at Stanford. Americas are spoiled and do not understand how good we have it. Time to wake up America!

Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of Russia in a time when it was falling seriously behind the Americans in many regards. The Soviet model was doomed to failure because it relied excessively on a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy that squandered profits. People didn't have any incentive to work; the economy was in the doldrums. Perestroika and glastnost were necessary reforms; Gorbachev really was caught in between a rock and a hard place. Westerners give him way too much credit, but he had no choice really. Soviet society was very hollow. They simply couldn't compete with other economies. While the US and the rest of the world was beginning to invest in information technology and hardware during the 1970's, the Soviets remained committed to the industrial model. The problem was that the world economy was shifting in focus and Russia wouldn't move along with it. They followed the old Stalinist model that asserted that producing a lot of industrial products was the measure of strength for a state. In today's economy, that is no longer necessarily the case. To top it off, the Soviets could no keep up with US arms production; while we only spent approximately 8% of GDP in defense during the early 1980's, the Soviets were spending at times up to 40%. There was no way they could expect to bear this burden and expect that people's standards of living would continue to go up. Gorbachev had no choice, he had to sign an Arms Reduction Agreement with Reagan. The other choice would be to bankrupt his country. But making this choice significantly weakened Gorbachev in the eyes of the hardliners in the Politburo. His fall was imminent at this point. The Soviet Union was held together only by the threat of force. By 1990, it was impossible to hold back. Gorbachev's economic and social openness policies lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It's intention was to shore it up but instead the deck of cards fell. The Soviets could no longer afford to hold together a massive empire by force. The hardliners would have ultimately failed even if their coup attempt had been successful. The threat of force was no longer enough to hold back Eastern Europe plus the Central Asian Republics from stating their autonomy.

Though he had not completely give up on the Soviet concept at the time of his rise to power, Mikhail Gorbachev deserves a lot of credit for acknowledging that the Soviet system was doomed to failure under the then status quo, and while Gorbachev probably only reflected the philosophies of much of the new Russia, he still gets the credit as the leader of this movement. Gorbachev did fail to preserve the union; however, that was most likely an impossible dream so he can't be faulted for that. The bottom line is that the West could have been faced with a Soviet Union with a use it or lose it mentality as the Cold War ended, but Gorbachev's leadership prevented that from happening. Mikhail Gorbachev was bon on March 2, 1931 in Privolnoje, Russia.

He realised the need for reform, but should have done more to preserve the Soviet Union. A world with only one superpower- a superpower that is insular, ignorant, and arrogant- isn't safe. The Soviets kept them in check. Also, Capitalism hasn't improved the lives of the ordinary working Russian much. All we seem to hear of is the lucky elite.

Destroyed Russia with his reforms.

Gorbachev is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He is not a reformer, but a hard line commie. His program of liberalization was a scheme devised by Lenin to fool the west into complacency.

You know the story of the emperor with no clothes? Gorbachev had the misfortune of being the emporer when the free world realized the entire evil empire had no clothes (or no food, or no consumer goods, and no public will to continue sacrificing generations to Marxist myths). He gets credit for letting his evil government unravel without bloodshed (a marked contrast from the rest of Soviet history), but really he had little choice. As Reagan said (when nobody believed him) -- communism was a sad chapter... destined for the ashheap of history.

it takes a very brave man to slap his own country's face into reality

Russia was in a no-win situation, and Gorbachev did what he had to do. I think he simultaneously gets too much credit and too much blame for the changes that resulted.

Launched a series of events which has transformed Russia from one of the world's superpowers, to one of the world's basket cases.