Later that year, as pro-democracy protests swept across the Communist states of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, the world held its breath. In 1989, he pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, ending a war that had killed tens of thousands and soured relations with Washington. president who had called the Soviet Union "the evil empire", and with him negotiated a landmark deal in 1987 to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Gorbachev struck up a warm personal rapport with Ronald Reagan, the hawkish U.S. The term "Gorbymania" entered the lexicon, a measure of the adulation he inspired on foreign trips. He was, in the words of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, "a man we can do business with". The West quickly warmed to Gorbachev, who had enjoyed a meteoric rise through regional party ranks to the post of General Secretary. The pace of change was, for many, dizzying. In December of that year he ordered a telephone to be installed in the flat of dissident Andrei Sakharov, exiled in the city of Gorky, and the next day phoned him to personally invite him back to Moscow. Gorbachev pressed on, describing the tragedy as a symptom of a rotten and secretive system. Glasnost faced a dramatic test in April 1986, when a nuclear power station exploded in Chornobyl, Ukraine, and authorities tried at first to hush up the disaster. Moscow squares seethed with impromptu discussions, censorship all but evaporated, and even the sacred Communist Party was forced to confront its Stalinist crimes. His policies of "glasnost" (free speech) and "perestroika" (restructuring) unleashed a surge of public debate arguably unprecedented in Russian history. "But this cost me very dear, I can tell you that." "My policy was open and sincere, a policy aimed at using democracy and not spilling blood," he told Reuters in 2009. With his clever, elegant wife Raisa at his side, Gorbachev at first enjoyed massive popular support. Gorbachev inherited a land of inefficient farms and decaying factories, a state-run economy he believed could be saved only by the open, honest criticism that had led so often in the past to prison or labour camp.
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