BERLIN — Thirty years ago on Wednesday, Mikhail S. Gorbachev became secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was the start of a rocky tenure at the head of a system that ultimately proved impossible to sustain or to reform. Europe and the United States seized the moment, and steered the world through the largely peaceful fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War. Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, Mr. Gorbachev advanced the vision of a “Common European Home,” in which a Europe “whole and free,” as the first President George Bush called it, would become a reality for all citizens of our Continent.
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