Editorial: Gorbachev once was bigger than Bob Dylan. Both strived for a better world.

In March 1999, Mikhail Gorbachev was contracted to give a speech at Benedictine University in Lisle. The university told the Tribune at the time that the former Soviet leader was a larger draw than Barbara Bush or Margaret Thatcher. Only Bob Dylan, Benedictine said, had eclipsed his popularity.

On that same day, Gorbachev visited the Tribune’s editorial board in Chicago. He offered us a warning: “Some people think America wants to keep Russia down,” he said. “The communists are exploiting this changing mood.”

Gorbachev went on to assert that the U.S. was suffering from a dangerous “superiority complex” and acting like Russia did not exist.

“I’m very concerned,” Gorbachev said to the board. “Maybe Americans don’t like me to speak out so openly on this, but I do so as a friend. . . . The U.S. has declared itself winner in the Cold War. This concept could take you too far.”

Russians, Gorbachev went on to say, “are just like Americans. They don’t like to be pushed.”

Reading that prescient exchange some 23 years later is informative, not least since many of the tributes since Gorbachev’s death Tuesday take the tack of honoring a man much better loved abroad than at home.

That’s a fair assertion to some degree, as the big crowd at Benedictine in 1999 suggests.

When the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher first met Gorbachev, she immediately clocked him as, in the parlance of the Iron Lady, a different kind of Soviet leader. One with whom one could work. And for all the boldness of Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech in 1987, the Gipper already had a relationship with the man whose name appeared at the beginning of his historic sentence. That speech wasn’t so much the rhetoric of defiance as an invitation to Gorbachev to work together. Reagan’s people well knew they had a good shot.

But the idea that Gorbachev was an American patsy, disloyal to the U.S.S.R., lured by the riches available in the West (such as speaking fees) is hardly a full or even an accurate portrayal.

Gorbachev was, in fact, deeply loyal to the country he served. He will forever be associated with glasnost (greater transparency) and perestroika (greater awareness of free markets and less central planning). But people forget Gorbachev saw both of those terms as close cousins of realpolitik. At the moment of his death, Marxist and Leninist ideas, usually expressed as “anti-capitalist” pronouncements under the veneer of cries for social justice, have taken much stronger hold in the U.S. than either Gorbachev or Reagan could have anticipated. The polarities of the 1990s no longer hold so strong.

That said, history is not overburdened with leaders of powerful nations who come to believe in more openness and transparency, however limited the baseline from which they began.

Gorbachev was not an egomaniac. He did not refuse to leave the stage. He was a strikingly astute observer of human nature, especially the way insecurity and a thirst for dominance is so often manifest in the human male, often with terrible consequences. He knew that to curb Russian exceptionalism, now abundantly apparent in Ukraine with terrible global fallout, he also had to remind Americans not to thump their chests about their own exceptionalism. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that neither glasnost nor perestroika did much for Gorbachev’s ability to hold on to personal power. On the contrary. The contrast with the actions of Donald Trump could not be more acute.

A good argument could be made that Gorbachev was naive in clinging to his socialist dreams by removing the illusory sense of safety the Russian people enjoyed due to their authoritarian government without admitting the need for ideological transformation. Perhaps inevitably, he then oversaw economic decline, instability and the crumbling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, initially heralded as a triumph in the West — McDonald’s for everyone! — but now seen more fully as also humiliating to many Russians.

Into that vacuum drove Vladimir Putin, looking to motorize the perennial political pendulum and exploit the emotions of the aggrieved and disrespected.

In the hours after Gorbachev’s death, an old photo surfaced on Twitter with the new headline: “Sometimes your enemy is right behind you.”

In the foreground is Gorbachev, his famous birthmark front and center, looking earnest and every bit the man who grew in reason as he aged and who came to hate to ugliness of totalitarian control so much that he was willing to risk everything on its diminishment.

Over his shoulder is an impishly youthful Putin, grinning and, it now seems, waiting ravenously for his opportunity to exploit the worst in human behavior, to shroud destruction with lies and bring death to innocents.

When Gorbachev was at the Tribune, he preached rhetorical modesty, humility and thoughtfulness. He told us that myopic Americans had to pay closer attention to the rumblings of the world at large and how it was receiving its bloviating rhetoric. He argued that global leadership does not mean humiliating your enemy.

He also clearly was warning us about the danger of the rise of the Putins of the world. His world.

Few of us saw it coming as clearly as the man who had pushed his people so hard in the opposite direction.

There is to be no state funeral for Gorbachev. But we’ll remember him here.

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