Maxim Stolyarov is an undergraduate reading PPE at New College.

It is generally well-known that it was a Soviet journalist who first called Margaret Thatcher ‘the Iron Lady’. What is not very well known is the exact role Lady Thatcher played in bringing down the Soviet Union. One reads very often that her role was ‘central’, and yet her only widely recognised contribution is opening Gorbachev to the West with one phrase: ‘We could do business together’. That is it. That is as much as most know of Margaret Thatcher’s involvement. Even after hours of research, I still know surprisingly little about what exactly it is that Baroness Thatcher had done, although every author seems to be convinced that her figure was central to the fall of Communism. So I neither can, nor want to write a historic account of the involvement of Margaret Thatcher with the Soviet leadership. I shall only try to humbly present my own account of what Lady Thatcher’s role seems to have been.