WHEN I studied Russian history it was with the feeling of someone who had arrived much too late at the party. The drinks had been drunk, the balloons popped, and what remained of the cake lay smashed on the floor.

I wasn’t alone in this attitude. As students we would moan that the best, most exciting times were gone.

Not that they would have seemed thrilling to the poor souls at the sharp end of politics, the ones who had to endure the decades of revolution, war, famine, and repression, who sacrificed so much to make the USSR the superpower it had become. All states are built on the bodies of the dead, and nowhere is this more true than Russia.

Swayed by romantic notions of Russia and her past, the present day politicians seemed oh so dull. Gone were the towering figures, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, even Brezhnev at an absolute push, and in their place was a procession of waxen-faced time servers who, having finally made it to the top job, turned out to have the longevity of carnival goldfish. In time there were more funerals, other old faces trying to pass as new. Much more of this and we would all be dead with boredom.

Fortunately the lecturer knew better and put us straight. Rather than nothing happening, Russia was in the early stages of what might turn out to be an epic transformation. The world order as we had come to understand it was about to be turned on its head, with Russia playing a lead role. We wanted history: we were about to get it. As ever with history it was going to be messy and unpredictable, and it might take some time to make sense of it all, but things were happening. What did we know, for starters, about this new guy, Gorbachev?

The announcement late on Tuesday of Mikhail Gorbachev’s death prompted many tributes, as well it might.

He was, presidents and prime ministers agreed, a leader who had shaped the world as it was today. But what did that mean? Had Gorbachev done so by accident or design, and were his actions ultimately for good or ill? Here, the picture grows murkier.

Part of Gorbachev’s initial attraction to the west is that he was “easy” to read, or easier than what had gone before. He was relatively young, in his fifties, when he came to power. He was charming, smiled a lot, he left the Kremlin to meet the public, he dressed well, as did his wife Raisa. He had plans. Ideas. Always talking about the future and what it promised.

Why, if you squinted a certain way you could look at Gorbachev and see your ordinary common or garden western politician. No wonder Mrs Thatcher thought she could “do business” with him. Reagan, the Great Communicator, sensed a kindred spirit.

If the West could not come to an accommodation with this Soviet leader there was no hope.

For a mixture of reasons Gorbachev lived up to the part the West carved out for him. Yes, he was for peace and against further nuclear proliferation, but he also knew the money was running out. Even if he had wanted to keep pace with the West on nuclear weapons he could not afford to do so. He was pragmatic and principled.

Whatever the balance of his motivations, he was successful, with Reagan, in making the world a generally safer place. The nukes were still there, and with them the capacity to destroy the planet, but there were fewer of them and we (or someone) knew where they were.

The success Gorbachev enjoyed on the international stage was not matched at home. The public knew well enough what state the economy and the country were in. They lived with the consequences of the state’s many failings every day.

Gorbachev had a plan, perestroika, and it was a reasonable enough one, but it was not enough to deal with the enormity of the problem. It was the same with glasnost. Freedom of expression was all very well when it came to lifting the ban on Animal Farm, but could this openness apply to everyone, everywhere in the vast Soviet empire?

Gorbachev was outstanding at big picture politics, nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from Afghanistan, keeping the tanks at home when country after country opted for self-determination. It was the detailed, day to day slog involved in improving ordinary people’s lives that appeared beyond him.

Like someone standing in front of a crumbling house, he knew roughly what needed to be fixed, but not how to do it. The results of his inability or inaction were catastrophic. The economy tanked, chaos reigned, and the looters, many of them in pinstripes, moved in. Ordinary Russians felt worse off than before. They were humiliated, angry.

Perhaps no leader could have done better in the time Gorbachev turned out to have. The empire was always going to collapse, as empires do, but its decline and transition to something else could have been managed better.

The west could certainly have done more to cushion the fall. Instead it busied itself elsewhere, looking forward to dealing with a weaker Russia when the dust settled.

There was a brief time after Yeltsin when matters could have turned out differently, but it didn’t happen. Too many of those in power were benefiting from the new wild west out east.

When the oligarchs became too greedy it took a real gangster to rein them in, one who was happy to fuel the narrative that Russia had been taken advantage of by outsiders. Here was a leader who promised to put that right, to make Russia great again.

Which brings us to today and the new Cold War, in every sense, stretching from Ukraine to our own hearths. For many Russians, Gorbachev has been held up as a warning of what happens when you start to trust the west. One minute they give you the Nobel peace prize, the next Nato is on your doorstep. Likewise, goes the thinking from the other side, Russia will never change, it will always fear outsiders (with good reason).

For all the tributes paid to him by world leaders, Gorbachev was ultimately a politician like any other. He did what he could when he could, for mostly the right reasons. Russians may judge him harshly for now; history has yet to make up its mind.