Mikhail Gorbachev is to be honoured in Dublin. Séamus Martin profiles the man who helped bring down the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall
In October 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, arrived in East Berlin for a State visit.
East Germany was in political chaos, its citizens were fleeing in their thousands to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The country's hard-line leader, Erich Honecker, saw just one solution: Moscow must send in the Red Army to crush the growing revolt. The power to do so lay in Gorbachev's hands.
To ensure East Germany's future and to keep the countries of Eastern Europe in Moscow's thrall, he could, as in the past, send the troops in at any hint of discord. But Mr Gorbachev's response was not what Honecker wanted.
He embraced him, planted three comradely kisses on his cheeks and told him he was on his own. It was the kiss of death for East Germany. A process had begun that was to change the map of Europe and bring the Cold War to an end.
In the West, Gorbachev gained a popularity which reached rock-star proportions. He was even given a nickname, something which would have been incongruous if applied to Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko.
Gorby, once a 13-year-old collective farm worker in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia, became, for a time, the most significant player on the world political stage. The political censors who had shackled the Russian media since Tsarist times were removed through his policy of glasnost, meaning openness. There was an explosion of free speech: newspapers, even Pravda, began to run articles criticising the way the country was run.
His next move, a restructuring of society known as perestroika, was destined to fail dismally and his popularity abroad was matched by blatant hostility at home. His enemies ranged from the haughty intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad, who mocked his south Russian accent and grammatical solecisms, to the tough Siberian miners, who rallied behind his arch-enemy Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin, a master of the populist publicity stroke, contrived at every move to increase Gorbachev's unpopularity and pounced at the opportunity to depose him when uncompromising hard-line elements in the Communist Party staged an abortive putsch in Moscow in August 1991.
Gorbachev was imprisoned in his dacha (country retreat) in the Crimea while Yeltsin captured world attention by climbing on to a tank in front of the Russian White House to defy those who had sent the army into the streets of the capital. The putsch collapsed after three days. Mr Gorbachev returned to Moscow.
His press conference, which I attended, was a tour de force which impressed even the most hardened of foreign correspondents.
This, however, was his last great moment. Some days later, he was humiliated in parliament by Yeltsin and his slide to political powerlessness began. In December, Yeltsin, along with President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Prime Minister Shushkevich of Belarus, formally and unexpectedly announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
By year's end, the Red Flag had been lowered from the Kremlin's towers and replaced by the old Tsarist tricolour. Gorbachev retreated into the political background, still lionised by the west, but increasingly and wrongly blamed at home for the demise of the USSR as a world power.
In more recent years, he has managed his own political foundation in Moscow and concentrated on ecological issues as president of the Green Cross international organisation. His wife and constant companion, Raisa, died in Germany where she had been treated for leukaemia in September 1999. Gorbachev was openly distraught. Russian public opinion softened towards him in his time of grief.
President Yeltsin, in a telegram, expressed his "pain" at the bereavement. The communist speaker of the Duma, Gennady Seleznyov, spoke of a "tragedy of the highest order". Both were renowned in the past for their unbridled hostility to the Gorbachevs.
Séamus Martin is International Editor and a former Moscow Correspondent of The Irish Times