Gorbachev a closet Christian

It was not hard to see, when Mikhail Gorbachev took the reins of the USSR, that something was different. All the glasnost and perestroika were new policies. An observer might have thought that the new Maximum Leader was perhaps not fully committed to the dialectical imperative. A bit of a softie, that is to say. And now we find that Gorbachev was a Christian all along, and indeed one with a particular fondness for the most gentle of saints, St. Francis of Assisi. No wonder the Wall fell. Reagan was playing the hardest of hardball against an "evil emperor" whose heart was not really in the evil empire game, unlike all of his predecessors. Sooner or later, the USSR would have had a leader who was a human being, with human feelings, rather than a committed ideologue. Better sooner than later.