Few statesmen of the 20th century have had such an impact at both home and abroad, nor has their legacy been so bitterly divided between the two arenas.
In death, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, is hailed in the West as the man who precipitated the collapse of Soviet Communism and ended the Cold War.
Yet at home he is reviled as the man responsible for what Vladimir Putin called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, the break-up of the Soviet empire, a Russian source of shame that this invasion of Ukraine was meant to begin to undo.
While the wholesale redrawing of the political map of Europe is Gorbachev’s most enduring legacy, it was never his intention. The reforms of glasnost,
