Gorbachev was great because he failed

Westerners now laud Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, but again, these were not initially meant to be democratic reforms. Yes, glasnost allowed Soviet citizens to blow off steam, but the main goal was to foster better communication in the Soviet economy. Perestroika was aimed at ditching Brezhnev-era cronyism and shortcuts, and to kick-start glaciated Soviet institutions.

Gorbachev, however, did not understand what he had set in motion. He thought he could control reform in pieces, accelerating it here, slowing it there, and never allowing any of it to turn into a challenge to the power of the Communist Party. He and his colleagues did not grasp the basic contradiction built into their own plans—that freedom means more disorder rather than less. And Gorbachev wavered in the face of political movements over which the regime quickly lost even the semblance of control. He was so taken aback (and perhaps worse, so taken by surprise) by the chaos he’d unleashed that he soon turned away from some of his own policies.

So did others in the Soviet leadership. Perestroika, insofar as anyone even knew what it meant, was already in deep trouble by the time of a major party meeting in 1987, where it became evident that the hard-liners had effectively pushed back the reformers and their plans. These failures led to fights and shifting alliances within the Kremlin. Gorbachev then tried to encourage similar reforms in Eastern Europe as a way of seeking leverage against his opponents at home. Again, he unleashed forces, this time in the Soviet empire, that he did not understand and that he could not control.