Mikhail Gorbachev, whose brand of perpetual revolution undid the Soviet empire he had sought to save, resigned from office a decade ago today.

When a star is born, it dazzles. When it burns out, it’s lost to memory. Mikhail Gorbachev, 70, was once a great red star. But on December 25, 1991, when Gorbachev resigned as President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it was a moment of little fanfare. He had long ceased to dazzle at home, no matter that Western diplomats still swooned over him. Rather than making the Soviet people rich, Gorbachev’s "perestroika" reforms had left them with food shortages. Boris Yeltsin, who in August 1991 had saved the president’s hide – and some would say Russia’s, too – by blocking an attempted coup d’etat, was the hero of the moment.Six days later, December 31, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, and the era of "newly independent states" officially began. Control passed to Yeltsin, who confessed his own mind was "polluted" by Leninism. As founder of a new Social Democratic moment in Russia, Gorbachev aims to put his ideas to practical use. But to many Russians, he has become a semi-tragic, semi-comic figure, capable of spouting idealistic platitudes but incapable of putting them to work. "We need a new system of values, a system of the organic unity between mankind and nature and the ethic of global responsibility."