Mikhail Gorbachev crossed the line traced by the Berlin Wall on Monday, a principal actor in the memorial service to its fall two decades ago. He was accompanied by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, who lauded him as the man who “made this possible – you courageously let things happen, and that was much more than we could expect”.
What he let happen was not just the end of the wall but the death of the country he had been chosen to lead and whose ideology he had been tapped to reinvigorate. The west lauded him for it then as it does now. But it has always played quite differently to eastern eyes.
He let go the Soviet Union, which no longer exists and will not again. He breached its defences, and once breached, they proved extraordinarily fragile.