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When Mikhail Gorbachev came to K-State in 2005, his legacy seemed pretty clear: He and Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, and he dissolved the Soviet Union and put Russia and Eastern Europe on a path to democracy.

That would’ve been an oversimplification even at the time. And in the 17 years since, it’s become clear that Russia’s path has veered dangerously off into authoritarianism again, headed by a strongman bent on re-establishing an empire. It’s tempting to even think that we’re back to where we started: The U.S. on one side, Russia on the other. You could make that case that Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy was wiped out, that he was some sort of aberration.

It’s impossible to know what the longer run will bring, but I want to argue, as a child of the 1980s, that Mr. Gorbachev remains one of the most important figures of at least the 20th Century. I’m still astounded that we got to see him speak in Manhattan. As an aside, that’s a tribute to Jon Wefald and Chuck Reagan, among others, for elevating the Landon Lecture series to the highest of heights. I hope it reaches those heights again.

Thing is, in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Gorbachev took charge in the Soviet Union, it seemed impossible to imagine a world without the Cold War. Everything, and I mean everything, was ultimately about that conflict. There were two superpowers, bent on destroying one another, with enough weaponry to blow up the Earth, many times over. It wasn’t at all clear who would win. Remember — the Soviets beat us into space, they beat us in Vietnam (or so it seemed) and they even beat us in basketball. We had our wins, too – including when Curtis Redding dunked on the godless Reds in Ahearn.

This was long before Bin Laden, before we thought much about viruses, before we Americans were divided into a red tribe and a blue tribe. There was really just one conflict, and it was everywhere, all the time, spoken or unspoken. We had nuclear fallout drills at Lee School.

Then came Mr. Gorbachev, and suddenly, they were knocking down the Berlin Wall, and then the Soviet Union ceased to exist. We were talking about a New World Order; serious people even talked about “the end of history,” in the sense that we were all pro-democracy, I guess. The old guard tried a coup, and eventually Mr. Gorbachev was moved out in favor of Boris Yeltsin, and then Russia sort of spiraled toward oligarchy. Eventually, along came Vladimir Putin, elected as president but at heart an imperial dictator.

But the world is still dramatically different, and I would say, dramatically better, than before Mr. Gorbachev came along. Perhaps the Soviet Union’s collapse was inevitable, but that collapse could have been far more destructive than the relatively gradual one he set in motion. And, as he said in his speech here, “It is sometimes said that I gave away Poland, I gave away Hungary, I gave away the Czech Republic. Well, I gave it to their people, I gave Hungary to the Hungarians, Poland to the Polish. That’s how it should be.”

Funny, how that seems today a rejoinder to Mr. Putin. Anyway, Mr. Gorbachev dramatically moved the world toward freedom and democracy. In light of his passing last week, that’s how he should be remembered.

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