About the book: 2015 / Under him, the Union shuddered like a spring ice floe and began to split, scattering fragments from East to West. Still, he's great. Whatever one may say, he managed to raise the Iron Curtain and these same West and East rushed towards each other. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, of course, was an outstanding head of our state. Apart from him, there were probably only four other people of this level and importance in Russian history. Prince Vladimir, who baptized Rus', Peter the Great, who, in the poet’s apt words, “strung it up on its hind legs,” Lenin, who created the world’s first socialist state, and Stalin. All of these “magnificent five” had one difference in comparison with other brilliant rulers of Russia. The time of their reign affected at least European history, and at most world history. Gorbachev is a complex phenomenon. It’s not for us to judge his actions now; we need to look at them in a hundred years. I remember his time at the helm with verbosity, emptying counters, the putsch of the State Emergency Committee, under him the most influential, and also the only, Soviet party, the CPSU, perished... He was unlucky all the time, even after becoming the first president of the USSR, Mikhail Sergeevich became the last president of the country of the Soviets. Under him, the Union shuddered like a spring ice floe and began to split, scattering fragments from East to West. And yet, he did well. Whatever one may say, he managed to raise the Iron Curtain and these same West and East rushed towards each other.