Gorbachev: The Man Who Prevented World War III?

MOSCOW, Nov. 8, 2009 — -- In June 1987, President Reagan came to the Berlin Wall and make a famous appeal to Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

The Western world applauded. But without Gorbachev, historians said the wall might not have come down in November 1989.

Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, the first Soviet leader to have been born after the 1917 revolution that ended the Russian empire. The USSR was at a standstill: a stagnant economy, an inefficient bureaucracy, a disgruntled population and an outdated political system with entrenched bureaucrats.

He immediately saw the need for reform and in the coming years would institute several that would restructure the government and give the Soviet people freedoms they had long been denied.

"That was the signal, that was the starting point," said Irina Kobrinskaya, a research fellow at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. "He decided it's high time to tell [the] truth, to be critical."

In January 1987, Gorbachev called for multi-candidate elections by secret ballot, something the Soviet Union had not seen. The new rules would transform the Soviet parliament elections of March 1989, when many of the most powerful communist leaders were voted out.

"We initiated [the reforms] because they were overdue," Gorbachev wrote in a recent New York Times editorial. "We were responding to the demands of the people, who resented living without freedom, isolated from the rest of the world."

"In just a few years -- a very short time in history's span -- the main pillars of the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union were dismantled and the ground was readied for a democratic transition and economic reforms," he continued. "Having done that in our own country, we could not deny the same to our neighbors."