In historical terms, Gorbachev is a big *loser*. Granted, as a person, he seems like a nice and reasonable human being. May God bless his soul. And history gave him a very bad hand. But *that* is exactly what defines great leadership! By definition, great leaders inherit messes. If they didn't -- and if they didn't turn things around -- then they would not be great. Actually, great leaders ascend to power *because* the status quo fails to deliver, *because* there are big messes to clean up. Great leaders are eager to clean big messes. By the way, Yeltsin was another big loser, and without the redeeming personal qualities that Gorbachev does seem to possess.
^^^^^ On great leaders being made by crises, necessity is the mother of invention and all that, here is Marx's historical sketch of Lincoln. Marx and Engels in the full article for which fhis is the ending predict that the North will now win the Civil War because of the Emancipation Proclamation he has just proclaimed. And this is October 1862 which I believe is before Gettysburg. Marx and Engels had been urging Lincoln to free the slaves from the beginning of the war, because, of course, the Southern economy was very dependent on slave labor, and this would majorly disrupt their economy, not to mention slaves fighting were a particularly fierce division of soldiers.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/10/12.htm Nevertheless, the invasion of Maryland was risked at a most favourable conjuncture. The North had suffered a disgraceful series of quite unprecedented defeats, the Federal army was demoralised, Stonewall Jackson the hero of the day, Lincoln and his government a universal laughing-stock, the Democratic Party, strong again in the North and people expecting Jefferson Davis to become president, France and England were openly preparing to proclaim the legitimacy — already recognised at home-of the slaveholders. “E pur si muove.” Reason nevertheless prevails in world history.
Lincoln’s proclamation is even more important than the Maryland campaign. Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. fie has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, cothurnus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be “fighting for an idea”, when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by, an idea, talks about “square feet”. He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances “to act the lion”. The most redoubtable decrees — which will always remain remarkable historical documents-flung by him at the enemy all look like, and are intended to look like, routine summonses sent by a lawyer to the lawyer of the opposing party, legal chicaneries, involved, hidebound actiones juris. His latest proclamation, which is drafted in the same style, the manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing tip of the old American Constitution.
Nothing is simpler than to show that Lincoln’s principal political actions contain much that is aesthetically. repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and politically, contradictory, as is done by, the English Pindars of slavery, The Times, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti. But Lincoln’s place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington! Nowadays, when the insignificant struts about melodramatically on this side of the Atlantic, is it of no significance at all that the significant is clothed in everyday dress in the new world?
Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way tip from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!
Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning.[Lectures on Aesthetics] Although Lincoln does riot possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour. When (foes he issue the proclamation declaring that from January 1, 1863, slavery in the. Confederacy shall be abolished At the very moment when the Confederacy as an independent state decided on “peace negotiations- at its Richmond Congress. At the very, moment when the slave-owners of the border states believed that the invasion of Kentucky by the armies of the South had made “the peculiar institution” just as safe as was their domination over their compatriot, President Abraham Lincoln in Washington.