Mikhail Gorbachev, the accidental hero

Gorbachev's life is a great example of how things never turn out as you expect. He set out to reform the Soviet Union and instead he destroyed it. He was a hero in the West but loathed by the Russians.

His life was also an inspiring example of how for a brief shining moment we can see progress in international politics.

Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985 aged 54. He could see that the country was in severe trouble.

He had two main tasks: modernize the country and reduce tensions with the United States (whose leader, Ronald Reagan, in 1983 called the USSR the "evil empire). He failed in one and succeeded brilliantly in the other.

The Soviet economic model was autarkic: built on a mixture of self-reliance at home and economic exploitation of territories in the near abroad. Everything was tightly regulated. It could do many basic things satisfactorily, such as providing food and accommodation, and it was illegal to be unemployed. Sullen, disengaged workers knew they could not be fired, even when they left their place of work to queue for a couple hours per week to obtain items. Their slogan was "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work".

By the 1980s economic life in the west was changing, with less attention focussed on manufacturing and mining, and more attention to the provision of services. Computers were beginning to transform western life.

But Russians lived in an information vacuum. For example, there were no maps of Moscow or telephone directories – either you already knew the information (and so you didn't need it) or you did not know it and may well be seeking it for inappropriate purposes (and so you must not find it).

I travelled extensively in the old Soviet Union in the Cold War days and found it a bewildering place. In 1985 I wrote about the challenge that information technology would pose to the USSR, which censored so much information.

Gorbachev attempted to reform the crumbling Soviet economy via policies of openness and transparency. He thought he could introduce just a bit of capitalism to stimulate the economy.

But he failed to understand how the west has flourished with capitalism. It is part of the west's DNA. A fish doesn't know it swims in water. Similarly, children in the west grow up earning pocket money via doing odd jobs and they see their parents working with a clear financial incentive.

The only Russians with capitalism in their DNA were the black marketers selling contraband. They knew intuitively how to make money. The average Russian, with a history of being tightly controlled by the Tsars and then the communists, never understood capitalism.

The Soviet state started to unravel.