The failure of perestroika and the consequent rejection of Gorbachev by the citizenry were increasingly obvious, though not appreciated in the West, where his popularity remained justifiably high. It reduced the leader of the U.S.S.R. to a series of backstairs manoeuvers and shifting alliances with the political groups and power groups that had emerged from the parliamentarization of Soviet politics, which made him equally distrusted by reformers who had initially rallied round him — whom he had indeed made into a state-changing force — and the fragmented party bloc whose power he had broken. He was and will go into history as a tragic figure, a communist "Tsar-Liberator" like Alexander II...who destroyed what he wanted to reform and was destroyed in the process...Gorbachev was, paradoxically, too much of an organization man for the hurly-burly of democratic politics he created; too much of a committee man for decisive action; too remote from the experiences of urban and industrial Russia, which he had never managed, to have the old party boss's sense of grass-roots realities. His trouble was not so much that he had no effective strategy for reforming the economy — nobody had even after his fall — as that he was remote from the everyday experience of his country.
— Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes
