Like Moses, Mikhail Gorbachev took his people towards a Promised Land. In the case of the former Soviet supreme leader, who has died aged 91, it was to a land of democracy and human rights.

Yet Fate deprived him of seeing it secured permanently. Largely without bloodshed, he oversaw the break-up of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, and successfully negotiated treaties with the USA, reducing nuclear forces and strategic weapons. He was the very last leader of the USSR, and its very best.

Among its many recipients, Gorbachev truly deserved his Nobel Peace Prize. He loosened the chains that bound Soviet Jews and facilitated their exodus. Nearly two million of them left, finding new homes elsewhere. Israel benefited enormously from the influx, and from his re-establishing diplomatic relations, which had been broken off because of Israel’s Six Day War triumph against Soviet arms. Some claimed that he contributed more to Israel’s growth than any other foreign leader. Israelis later rewarded him with peace prizes, and a new breed of potato, the “Mikhail”.

In a speech at Babi Yar, the site in Kyiv of one of the largest Nazi massacres of Jews, he lamented that Soviet soil had suffered “the venomous sprouts of antisemitism” and regretted losing Jewish citizens.

He described them as “so many talented, skilful, enterprising people.” For those who remained in the USSR, he gave them freedom of religion. Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered, tortured and imprisoned on Soviet soil. It was Gorbachev who put an end to all of that. How did this committed Communist come to be a devotee of humanitarianism and human rights?

Mikhail Gorbachev GettyImages-1192534564

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born in South West Russia in 1931 to Russian and Ukranian parents, just before a famine. It starved half his native village, including two aunts and an uncle.

As a youth, he worked on combine harvesters in a collective, Russia’s version of the kibbutz. He joined Stalin’s Communist Party, studied law at the elite Moscow State University, and married his fellow student, the intelligent and elegant Raisa Titarenko. He loved her to the end of his life, and never married again after her death from cancer. They had one child, Irina.

When Stalin died, Gorbachev supported Khruschev’s condemnation and reversal of Stalin’s many excesses.

Stalin had murdered millions and sent millions more to the Gulag. That was a path open to Stalin’s successors and trodden to a lesser degree by some of them.

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Gorbachev

But it was not Gorbachev’s path. He joined the Communist Party’s apparatus, and made a speedy climb through his ability, energy and practicality. By the age of 54 he was already the General Secretary of the USSR Communist Party’s Central Committee – the USSR’s de facto leader, with full powers. At only 54 he was a mere nipper compared to the octogenarian and septuagenarians, who preceded him.

He served as the USSR’s supreme leader from 1985 to 1991, until its dissolution. These six years proved more momentous for the entire world than any since the Second World War. The USSR before he came to power was moribund, crippled by corruption, over-centralisation, communist economics, excessive militarisation and political and religious repression.

He breathed new life into his country, enabling the birth of modern Russia. Chernobyl’s nuclear catastrophe propelled his reforms relentlessly forwards. Best known among them in the West were perestroika, a rebuilding of the economy, and glasnost, a new openness and transparency in conducting government, and freedoms of the press, thought, and conscience.

In one sense Gorbachev changed my own life. Before he came to power, when I was 13, the late Chief Rabbi Jakobovits encouraged me to undergo a second barmitzvah ceremony. It was to symbolise the fact that Soviet Jews were prevented from celebrating theirs due to Soviet persecution.

After Gorbachev became General Secretary, I realised that this was a historic opportunity to welcome Russians to his dream of “our common European Home.” Imagine an enlarged EU with all those European States, who want it, and without arms aimed at each other. Wouldn’t that be a goal worth pursuing?

So I learned Russian in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, (taught by genial former dissidents) and opened a law office in Moscow. I lunched with Gorbachev there, shortly after his successor President Yeltsin fired at and stormed, their own parliament.

Gorbachev was congenial and self-deprecating, open to new ideas and confident that he had done the right thing in reforming Russia. But I saw a side of him that raises him even further than many modern statesmen.

Lord Hailsham, Margaret Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, told me that a politician must never admit to lack of knowledge. It undermines one’s authority. Yet Gorbachev was very open about not knowing many things, including what was happening in Russia’s government and economy, even when he himself ran them! He told me there was too much to track. Don’t we need our own leaders to tell us the truth, and admit what they don’t know?

Another largely unknown side of Gorbachev, was his love of singing his wife’s favourite songs. You can see BBC correspondent Steven Rosenberg’s masterful interview and accompaniment of him, at the piano in 2019, on Youtube. You’ll also see Gorbachev’s great diplomatic skills deployed in avoiding answering questions on the merits of Brexit.

Many nationalist, Communist and other Russians will never forgive what they see as his betrayal of them, for his overseeing the break-up of their Soviet Empire and Warsaw Pact. But in the eyes of committed Democrats, those deeds are virtues.

For Baltic State nationals, Georgians and Azeris, he bears responsibility for the deaths of some of their citizens during protests. Dipsomaniacs will never forgive him for his many restrictions on alcohol.

He wisely extricated the USSR from Afghanistan, and saved enormous casualties and costs. By the standards of previous Russian leaders, he was exemplary.

US President Ronald Reagan confided to his diary after his last meeting with Gorbachev: “We parted as partners, to make a better world.” Gorbachev was a true hero of our times. When comes another such?

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev: born March 2, 1931. Died August 30, 2022