He was forced into reform in a desperate effort to save the Soviet Union and preserve socialism.
He continued on that path even after visiting America, and discovering how much higher standards of living were there for the lower and middle classes (dramatically, contrary to the beliefs of a surprisingly large number of Americans).
Even if he simply remained a True Believer in the socialist utopia he was nominally fighting for, his actions in trying to preserve it were wrong. He deserves no credit, and should be remembered as simply the last in a line of authoritarian Soviet leaders who terrorized their own people and whose deprivations are still acutely felt throughout the former Soviet world, and especially in Russia.
He never redeemed himself, preferring instead to rewrite history to try to depict himself as a deliberate dismantler of the USSR, and spent his last years as an apologist for Putin’s very similar regime, and his last days refusing to speak out against Putin’s fascist and imperialist war in Ukraine.
These puff pieces about him are shameful.
