"I like Mr. Gorbachev," British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in 1984. "We can do business together."
Many Westerners shared the sentiment, including, most consequentially, Thatcher's iron-willed contemporary, former President Ronald Reagan. Along with his vice president and eventual successor, George H.W. Bush, Reagan did business with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on arms control and other issues that cooled, and eventually ended, the Cold War.
That Western success was seen differently by many Soviet citizens then and Russian citizens today. Many, maybe even most, revile Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday in Moscow at age 91, despite his actions that ultimately freed them from decades of Communist dictatorship when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
