On this day, March 10, 1985, Mikhail S. Gorbachev became the new and last leader of the Soviet Union. He represented a new generation of leadership and immediately reached out to the United States and the west on arms control and mutual cooperation. He began the democratization of the Soviet Union and the loosening of its grip on its eastern European satellite states. In hindsight, economic failure of the communist collectivist totalitarian model, the increasing resistance in Russia and Eastern Europe to this model, the loss of the war in Afghanistan and the inability to keep up with the west in the costly arms race, all played roles which appeared to make the failure of the Soviet Empire only a matter of time. However, no one anticipated the rapid movement towards ending totalitarian communism in Russia and eastern Europe in terms of the increasingly stunning decisions made by Gorbachev himself. It was certainly plausible that threatened with demise, as one of the two superpowers in the world with enormous nuclear arsenals, the Soviet response could have been defensive to the point of violence leading to war threatening the entire planet. No one dreamed in 1985 that within a mere four years of Gorbachev taking power, by the end of 1989, the Berlin wall would fall, the Soviet Empire would effectively be history, and the Cold War, which had come within an inch of potentially ending life on earth, would be ended. Do you agree that the quality of political leadership can make a decisive difference in the outcome of historical events, or at least in how the outcomes come about in terms of initiating or preventing enormous risks for humanity, regardless of other forces that may make such events inevitable in some manner?