JOHN TAMNY: The Myth That Mikhail Gorbachev ‘Ended the Cold War.’

All of this and more came to mind while reading the various obituaries and commentary on Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week. Almost without fail the remembrances of Gorbachev indicated that he “ended the Cold War.” What a laugh. Gorbachev did no such thing.

As George Will put it in his own commentary, commentary that near uniquely didn’t embrace the Gorbachev hagiography, the man who oversaw the dismantling of the Soviet Union didn’t want to. Gorbachev very much believed in this intensely cruel, freedom suffocating, historically murderous nation, and wanted it to survive. Which is a reminder that Gorbachev didn’t “end the Cold War” as boldfaced thinkers like Maureen Dowd strangely asserted as much as reality intruded on Gorbachev’s anti-human, and rather naïve understanding of humanity. Really, imagine wanting to maintain such a failed country defined by what Hedrick Smith described in The Russians as “lines for everything.”

With Reagan, it wasn’t about whether the Soviet Union would survive. Reagan knew it would not.

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