MIKHAIL GORBACHEV -- THE MAN WITH A PEACE MISSION

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV -- THE MAN WITH A PEACE MISSION 

The West cheated Gorbachev. Had they not, the world today would have been a better place by far to live in.

Mikhail Gorbachev will live in history as, perhaps, the greatest figure of the second half of the 20th century, the man with a peace mission which the warmongering West took full advantage of but foiled in effect once the Soviet Union had been successfully brought to its collapse. 

Today's Russia with the Putin menace is as much communist legacy as the West's wicked doing in advancing its imperialist cause at the expense of Gorbachev's magnanimity and utopian idealism of a better world order. The West has much to account for for its deliberate flouting of the promises made to the last leader of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin, acting as antithesis to such betrayal, is taking Russia back to its communist days but will fail, for the seeds of change that Gorbachev had planted will within a generation fructify as the harvest of democracy and freedom in the real sense of the terms.

Meanwhile, the West will carry on hawklike with its pretence of playing the enlightened democrat's role. But, what of it? History will take its due course and the West will have to reap the harvest of what it has sown while Mikhail Gorbachev will soar in human imagination as the harbinger of peace and light, freedom and goodness for all, a man with a mission who was way ahead of his times and taller than any of his hawkish contemporaries at home or abroad.

Written by Sugata Bose