Mikhail Gorbachev need feel no resentment when he hears himself described as a transitional leader. As Winston Churchill might have observed: some leader, some transition. Gorbachev presided over the dissolution of a truly evil empire, brought freedom to hundreds of millions of oppressed people and lifted the threat of a cataclysmic nuclear war. The wonder was not that the President of the Soviet Union, a fervent socialist to the end, managed his revolution well but that he launched it at all.
In his resignation speech last week, Gorbachev conceded that he had not been a complete success. He was convinced that...
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