Charles Kenny discusses Mikhail Gorbachev in this weeks' Foreign Policy column.
From the Article
Mikhail Gorbachev turns 80 on March 2, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, over which he presided, celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall. In the intervening years, Gorbachev has put out an album, filmed pizza commercials, and founded a string of failed political parties. And with the benefit of two decades' worth of hindsight, the legacy of Gorbachev's accomplishment, however staggering, might seem a bit equivocal, too: rich, stable democracies in most of Eastern Europe, but also the increasingly czarist antics of Vladimir Putin and a miserable assortment of collapsing economies and vicious strongmen throughout the 'stans. And global tensions, from the Middle East to the Spratly Islands, have hardly gone away.
But Gorbachev has left one unambiguous legacy: Thanks to his actions, the world is a less violent place than it used to be. That's in large part because the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union gave a considerable boost to the fortunes of democratization and multilateralism worldwide -- historical vectors that have produced a remarkable reduction in the amount of war in the world.