Mikhail Gorbachev

I always had a bit of a soft spot for Mikhail Gorbachev because it always seemed to me that the whole Soviet Union break up thing was a situation that he began rolling which kind of got away from him and before he realised what was happening, it had snowballed and he had done himself out of a job.
As a Cold War kind in the 80's, i remember the quick turnaround of Soviet Leaders from Brezhnev to Andropov and Chernenko who all seemed scary men in a nation armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles and then along come Gorbachev in 1986 with his Perestroika and Glasnost and meeting with the Western leaders to reduce the Nuclear Arsenals and finally it seemed that the insanity which was Mutually Assured Destruction was a reducing threat.
It was Andropov who realised that the Soviet Defence budget was crippling them and he started the reformations which Gorbachev continued although during later interviews, he admitted that he envisioned a gradual change to a form of Socialism over the course of a decade or two but within a few short years the Soviet Union had broken up and Communism was falling all around Eastern Europe.
It may have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize but as the USSR crumbled, his powers were transferred to Russian President Boris Yeltsin who's political endeavours are best summed up by the story that he once was so drunk while flying to a meeting in Scotland that he couldn't get off the plane.  
Gorbachev never made any secret that events just overtook him and my memory of him will always be in my minds eye, as he cleared his desk that final day in 1991, he looked around him and thought 'How the hell did this happen?'