President R. Reagan and the Fall of the USSR

In its today issue, Jan. 24,2010, the USA TODAY published its COVER STORY based on its interview with President Grorge H.W. Bush on President Reagan: "Recalling the private, "real, genuine man that he was".   It is in commemoration of the 30th Anniversary of President Reagan first inaugurated on January 20, 1981. President Ronald Reagan was truly a great president, adored and respected by all, an iconic figure of the Republican party. What interested me in this long story  is his role in the demise of the Soviet Union.
    This is the excerpt of what it is written on "The Kremlin Connection": "In 1985, Reagan dispatched Bush to Moscow for the funeral of Konstantin Chernenko and a meeting with the Soviet leader's successor, Mikhail Gorbachev.
    In a March 13 memo to the president, Bush proposed that Reagan establish a back channel to Gorbachev to create "truly personal rapport with this new and different leader."
   The following year, Gorbachev begin instituing domestic and foreign policy changes that eventually led to the end of Soviet power and Communism in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    "People around Reagan were skeptical" of the Reagan-Gorbachev link Bush had recommended, he said, but the two built a trusting relationship that "laid a great foundation" for the historic changes that followed.
    Reagan had labeled the Soviet Union the "evil empire" in a 1983 speech and in 1987 challenged Gorbachev to "tear down" the Berlin Wall that separate the democratic and communist parts of Germany.
    "Some people thought that rhetoric was too hot," Bush said, "but it all worked out."
    The culmination of those efforts came during Bush's presidency: The Berlin Wall was distmantled in 1989, and the Soviet Union unraveled in 1991." - end of excerpt.

Lesson learned: An Empire, a Nation, or any human organization is not immortal. It was born, getting old and may die like a human body...

Update: February 6 marks the 100th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan birth's.