PARIS -- Twenty years ago this week, crowds forced open the hated Berlin Wall, Communist East Germany collapsed, and the once mighty Soviet empire began to crumble.

This was one of modern history's most dramatic and dangerous moments. No one knew if the dying Soviet Union would expire peacefully, or ignite World War III.

In 1975, Andrei Sakharov and a group of leading Soviet academicians had warned the Kremlin that unless ruinous defence spending was slashed and funds refocused on modernizing the industrial base, the Soviet Union would collapse by 1990.

In November 1989, the empire built by Stalin was on its last legs. The U.S.S.R. had 50,000 battle tanks and 30,000 nuclear warheads, but could not feed its people. Military spending consumed 20% of the economy.

Afghanistan's mujahedeen were defeating the mighty Red Army. The Poles, secretly funded by Pope John Paul II and the CIA, had risen in revolt. So too Hungarians, Lithuanians, and East Germans.

Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had to make a fateful decision: Allow events to take their course, or order the Red Army and KGB to crush the spreading uprisings -- and run the risk of war with NATO.

Unlike his brutal Soviet predecessors, Gorbachev was a man of profound moral values, a genuine humanist and idealist who believed he could reform the U.S.S.R. through democratic socialism. He refused to use force.

But once fear of repression was removed, the Soviet Union, a nation of 120 languages, shattered. Gorbachev could not control the ensuing whirlwind his reforms had sown. Today, most Russians revile Gorbachev for wrecking the Soviet Union. The sinister Communist era, including Stalin's monstrous crimes, are being sugar-coated with nostalgia.

In truth, the Soviet Union was history's most brutal, murderous tyranny that killed three times more victims than Hitler. Gorbachev did the world a huge favour.

For me, Gorbachev was one of the greatest men of our time. He put international law, basic humanity, and civilized behaviour before the demands of brute power. We must also salute Gorbachev's chief lieutenant, former Georgian KGB chief and Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Schevardnadze, who urged total decommunization and disarmament. Later, as president of independent Georgia, he was overthrown -- ironically -- by a U.S.-organized revolution.

Gorbachev purged hardliners from the Soviet military-industrial complex, vetoed an anti-missile system, sharply downsized the Soviet military, and wisely ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

But when Gorbachev sensibly sought total nuclear disarmament, president Ronald Reagan, obsessed by the unworkable Star Wars anti-missile project, refused Russia's offer that would have eliminated all nuclear weapons and missiles.

Other courageous Russian reformers who helped end the Cold War deserve to be remembered: Anatoly Chernayev; Georgi Shakhnazarov; Alexander Yakovlev, former ambassador to Canada; and Gorbachev's brave, cerebral wife and confidante, Raisa.

Germany's chancellor Helmut Kohl and U.S. president George H.W Bush also merit kudos for their able management of the Cold War's end. By contrast, Britain's Margaret Thatcher and France's Francois Mitterrand shamefully relapsed into Europe's evil old ways by trying to block German unification.

Gorbachev kept begging the western powers to launch another Marshall Plan to rescue the dying Soviet Union and democratize it. Tragically, they did not.

Communist die-hards launched a farcical, drunken coup against Gorbachev that was thwarted by the courage of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, aviation marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, and KGB moderates.

In the end, Gorbachev was left leader of a nation that had ceased to exist, the object of popular wrath, a great statesman without a country, a Russian King Lear.

Twenty years later, the world owes Gorbachev an enormous debt of gratitude for ending the Cold War, and freeing Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Thank our lucky stars Gorbachev was in power when the Soviet Union met its inevitable collapse -- or we could have faced World War III.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev showed that once in a millennium a great political leader can rise above the law of the jungle.

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