It is a great pleasure today to mark the birthday of one of the 20^thCentury’s most significant leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev.  The final leader of the Soviet Union before the communist regime’s collapse in 1991, Mr. Gorbachev helped steer his crumbling nation with  reforms not seen in the totalitarian USSR since 1917. Gorbachev's reforms included ushering in greater freedoms for Soviet citizens under his policy of glasnost (openness) and his attempts to reform the USSR’s economy by decreasing centralization, a process he called perestroika (restructuring). Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985 and only days into the job held a lengthy meeting with Canada’s Brian Mulroney in Moscow. Prime Minister Mulroney was impressed. “Gorbachev is indeed an impressive individual,” he wrote in his private journal while still in Moscow. “He speaks slowly and carefully. He is at home in this room in the Kremlin and his confidence shows.” Five years later, this time at a private luncheon with Prime Minister and Mrs. Mila Mulroney at 24 Sussex, Gorbachev recalled his thoughts just ahead of becoming Soviet leader. “On March 10, 1985, he said, they (Gorbachev and his wife) went for a walk at 3 a.m.,” Mulroney recalled in his journal’s for May 29^th, 1990. “The next morning the Politburo would meet to select a successor to Chernenko. He said he had had no ambition to lead but he told (his wife) that if he were to be chosen, ‘This cannot be allowed to continue.’  That was the birth of glasnost and perestroika, he said.” Mulroney enjoyed an excellent relationship with President Gorbachev and Canada played a leading role – particularly on the delicate Cold War issue of German reunification – as the USSR approached its historic end. In fact, as the Soviet Union was only hours away from dissolving at Christmas 1991, Mr. Gorbachev reached out to Canada’s Prime Minister from the Kremlin to thank Canada for our nation’s positive role in the peaceful transition that ended the Cold War. It was a proud moment both for Canada and for Prime Minister Mulroney, personally. caption id="attachment_543376" align="aligncenter" width="440" Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mikhail Gobachev, the last President of the USSR/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.