Mikhail Gorbachev

We have just finished the Chapter of the Fall of the Communist Empire in History. Then I gradually came to understand the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

It's really hard to give a comprehensive judgment of this man. In my view he is a hero, who had the heart and ambition, but eventually failed.

He was quite farseeing, as in he could see what was needed to really improve the developments of the Soviet Union. However, at the same time, he was not wise enough. Maybe he hadn't expected that he might fail one day. Or I would rather believe that he had thought of his failure, but was still determined to take a go on his political career, or more accurately, on the destiny of his nation.

When the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communism seemed inevitable, Gorbachev still endeavored to find a solution. He refused to give his country or his people up. His policies were brilliantly, but not applicable to the Soviet Union of that period, and thus, in a way, sped up the fall of the Communist Empire.

It all seemed ridiculously, when I read about the fact that the communist hard-liners thought Gorbachev's actions were all anti-communism. Didn't any one of them have sense? Couldn't they foresee what would happen to the USSR if no informs were introduced? And the people, why were they all so shortsighted? Was it true that no one in the Soviet Union could understand his pure diligence?

However, I knew clearly that all my accusations were just biased. No one was to be blamed. That is history. You have no stand to give judgments about anything, if you have never experienced the event yourself. In most occasions you can't even differentiate the right and wrong, because that is called history, such a complex subject that you can never know the exact solution which you can expect to get in science. Maybe this is the charm of literature.

Gorbachev, if I am to say, is a hero, who has born in a wrong age.