In Memory Of A Truly Great Leader

This is what I posted here almost three years ago, in September 2019, when I read that Mikhail Gorbachev was ill. It was titled "Tribute To A Great Leader". In posting each week I usually put the visit first, when something comes before the visit it means that it is really important.

When a famous person dies, they are remembered and their accomplishments reviewed. During my youth, there was a great world leader that changed my view of and way of thinking about the world. This leader will likely be leaving us one of these days. So why not have the tribute before his death?

Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. The ill and aging Konstantin Chernenko was not expected to live much longer and I awoke to the morning newspaper proclaiming Gorbachev as being proclaimed the new leader after Chernenko's death.

Mikhail Gorbachev was a leader like the Soviet Union had never seen before. He was charming and a match for Ronald Reagan as "The Great Communicator". Gorbachev knew that Communism had to be reformed and introduced the two new policies of "Glasnost" (openness) and "Perestrouka" (restructuring). He made many enemies at home among the "Old Guard" of Communists.

Gorbachev has just so much in common with Martin Luther. Just as Martin Luther always considered himself as a Catholic, he only wanted to reform the church and didn't want to start a new church certainly not the Lutheran church with his name on it, Gorbachev sought to reform Communism and always still considered himself as a Communist.

But what both had in common is that they opened doorways to reform, but then couldn't control what followed them through those doorways. Martin Luther, the reform seeker, was followed by men who had no intention of reconciling with the Catholic Church and an entirely new branch of Christianity began with the Reformation, the Protestants.

Likewise Gorbachev, seeking only to reform and modernize Communism, was followed by Boris Yeltsin who publicly destroyed his Communist Party membership card. Communism in the Soviet Union, as well as the Soviet Union itself and Gorbachev's rule of it, ended on Christmas Day of 1991.

But the end of the Cold War, which came in 1989, would never have been possible without Mikhail Gorbachev. The expansion of the European Union into eastern Europe would never have happened.

Gorbachev had a great effect on me. I had been sure that countries like America and Britain were always in the right when in conflict with other countries. But this magnetic and eloquent Russian, even if he couldn't speak English, caused doubts to begin to creep in. I decided that no one should think that they are above anyone else and one of the results of that is these weekly visits on this blog to places across the world.

With this blog, I am now in a position to promote peace and understanding in this world and that is exactly what I am going to do. All of these wars are just so pathetic. God gave us all that we need here to build a paradise, and this is what we do with it. There is a problem with the world and human nature is that problem, and we have got to overcome it by relying on the Word of God.

Does anyone remember when Gorbachev used the term "God on High", and the Soviet news agency tried to censor it?

I would like to proclaim Mikhail Gorbachev as the most important person of the second half of the Twentieth Century.