Mikhail Gorbachev liberated millions, even if he didn’t set out to

An empire built on lies and violence is not worth saving. Mikhail Gorbachev, who died this week in Moscow at the age of 91, understood that above all else. For this, he deserves to be celebrated, especially by the hundreds of millions of people who have lived in greater freedom and peace since he let the Soviet empire collapse and thus ended the cold war. The tragedy is that so many have either forgotten the lessons of his extraordinary story, or drawn precisely the wrong conclusions from it.

Mr Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet Union or its wider dominion (see Obituary). He aimed, rather, to make it stronger and better, through his twin policies of openness and reform, glasnost and perestroika. He believed in the socialist project far more than in liberal democracy; but he also knew that secrecy and repression bred only corruption and dysfunction, and that what he viewed as a worthy and humanist project would not survive without change.