Eastern Europe was in flames. The once mighty Soviet Empire was crumbling. No one knew if it would expire peacefully, or ignite World War III.  In 1975, Andrei Sakharov and leading Soviet academicians had warned the Kremlin that unless ruinous defence spending was slashed and funds refocused on modernising the industrial base, the Soviet Union would 
collapse by 1990.

In November, 1989, the empire built by Stalin was on its last legs. The USSR had 50,000 battle tanks and 30,000 nuclear warheads, but could not feed its own people. Military spending consumed 20 per cent of the economy. In many ways, the Soviet Union was an army, disguised as a state.

In Afghanistan, the mujahideen backed by Pakistan and the western powers, were close to defeating the Red Army. The Poles, secretly funded through front companies in Panama by Pope John Paul and the CIA, had risen in revolt. So, too, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and East Germans.

Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had to make a fateful decision: follow his principles of legality and reform by allowing events to take their course, or order the Red Army and KGB to crush the spreading uprisings — and run the risk of war with NATO. Gorbachev’s Soviet predecessors would not have hesitated to send in their tank armies. But Gorbachev was a man of profound moral values, a genuine humanist and idealist who believed he could reform the USSR through democratic socialism. He refused to use force. But fear and repression were the glue that held together the USSR, a nation of 120 languages. Once removed, the Soviet Union quickly began to disintegrate. Gorbachev could not control the ensuing whirlwind his reforms had sown.

Today, most Russians revile Gorbachev for wrecking the Soviet Union. The sinister Communist era, including Stalin’s monstrous crimes, are being sugarcoated with nostalgia. In truth, the Soviet Union was history’s most brutal, murderous tyranny that killed three times more victims than Hitler.

For me, Gorbachev was one of the greatest men of our time. He put international law, basic humanity, and civilised behaviour before the demands of brute power.

We must also salute his chief lieutenant, former Georgian KGB chief and Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Schevardnadze, who urged total de-communisation and disarmament. Later, as president of independent Georgia, he was overthrown — ironically — by a US-sponsored revolution.

Gorbachev purged hardliners from the Soviet military-industrial complex, vetoed an anti-missile system, sharply downsized the Soviet military, and wisely ended the Soviet occupation 
of Afghanistan.

But when Gorbachev sensibly sought total nuclear disarmament, president Ronald Reagan, obsessed with the unworkable Star Wars anti-missile project, refused Russia’s offer that would have eliminated nuclear weapons and missiles. Other courageous Russians reformers who helped end the Cold War deserve to be remembered: Anatoly Chernayev; Georgi Shakhnazarov; former ambassador to Canada, Alexander Yakovlev; and Gorbachev’s brave, cerebral wife and confidante, Raisa.

Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President H.W Bush also merit kudos for their able management of the Cold war’s end. By contrast, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s Francois Mitterand shamefully relapsed into Europe’s evil old ways by trying to block German unification.

President Gorbachev kept begging the western powers to launch another Marshall Plan to rescue the dying Soviet Union’s economy. Tragically, they did not. Communist die-hards launched a farcical, drunken coup against Gorbachev that was thwarted by the courage of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, Aviation Marshall Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, 
and KGB moderates.

In the end, Gorbachev was left leader of a nation that had ceased to exist, the object of popular wrath, a great statesman without a country, a Russian King Lear, alone and abandoned by all.

Twenty years on, the world owes Gorbachev an enormous debt of gratitude for ending the Cold War, and freeing eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Thank our lucky stars Gorbachev was in power when the Soviet Union met its inevitable collapse – or we could have faced World War III.

He showed that once in a millennium a great political leader can rise above the law of the jungle.

Eric Margolis is a veteran US journalist who reported from the Middle East and Asia for nearly two decades