Gorbachev may have been a genuine reformer, but he was also a card-carrying communist. His reforms and the internationalism represented by his withdrawal from the Cold War battlefield were an attempt to restore the Soviet state to the Leninist mission he believed Stalin and his ilk had corrupted. In response to unrest in the ethnic republics, Gorbachev sought to refashion the USSR as a new ‘Union of Sovereign States,’ keeping Leninist internationalism at the core of his planned cure for USSR’s ills, even as rivals such as Boris Yeltsin abandoned the Communist Party. Gorbachev only allowed the Soviet Union to breathe its last when he lost his faith.

Gorbachev’s resignation was not sparked by an epiphany. He even signed off on the Soviet Union’s dissolution on December 25^th 1991 with resignation, noting that “the policy prevailed of dismembering this country and disuniting the state, with which I cannot agree”. Communism went unmentioned.

In later life, it became clear Gorbachev had abandoned his Leninist beliefs. By 1997 he was filming ads for Pizza Hut; 10 years later it was Louis Vuitton. He remained an advocate for peace, though his illness and Vladimir Putin’s system of information control meant there was no open denunciation of the invasion of Ukraine. A confidante claimed he opposed it, describing it as the death-knell to his legacy. But Gorbachev, like Putin, had wanted to retain sovereignty over Ukraine.

What sets Gorbachev apart from Putin, and any other leader of a great power, was that he begrudgingly realised his vision was an illusion. He was the wrong man, at the right time.