World Leaders Hail Gorbachev’s Legacy : Reaction: He wins praise for encouraging freedom, democracy and disarmament. But China says he has just caused trouble.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev will take his place in history as one of the great figures of this century, world leaders and scholars said as the Soviet president relinquished leadership of a nation that no longer exists.

“It is given to very few people to change the course of history,” British Prime Minister John Major said. “But that is what Gorbachev has done. Whatever happens today, his place in history is secure.”

Major said the former Soviet Union is “now a country . . . well on the way to democracy. That is the greatest legacy he will leave.”

Staunchly Communist China, however, sounded a bitter farewell. In an official statement issued Wednesday, Beijing blamed Gorbachev outright for the collapse of his country, saying “ ‘new thinking,’ glasnost and ‘political pluralism’ have brought political chaos, ethnic strife and economic crises.”

Gorbachev announced his resignation in a nationally televised speech four days after 11 of the 12 former Soviet republics formed a new commonwealth, essentially replacing the Soviet Union.

“This is a very great man,” said Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, one of Gorbachev’s most ardent Western admirers.

“He restored liberty to all the East European countries. . . . He brought it for the first time to the peoples of the Soviet Union. . . . That is a tremendous achievement . . . and he did it all without a shot being fired.”

President Bush praised Gorbachev’s personal courage and his transformation of the Soviet Union.

Former President Ronald Reagan said Gorbachev “will live forever in history.”

“He has been willing to break down barriers that have divided our countries and enslaved his citizens. The people of the Soviet Union and all freedom-loving people around the world owe Mikhail Gorbachev a great debt of thanks.”

“Without Mikhail Gorbachev, the overcoming of the East-West conflict and the unprecedented success in the last years of disarmament and arms control would not have been possible,” German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said. He added that the German people are grateful for Gorbachev’s role in the reunification of their long-divided country.

In Israel, Foreign Minister David Levy said that “Israel remembers and appreciates the historic part” Gorbachev played in permitting free Jewish emigration and restoring diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.

In the United States, scholars and political figures were divided on how history will judge Gorbachev’s performance.

“Gorbachev is a towering figure in contemporary world affairs,” said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe. “Although I have been disappointed by his record in the last few years, there is no doubt that when the history of his time is written he will be the preeminent person, for his opening up of the Soviet Union and changing its course.”

Richard Pipes of Harvard University, a noted conservative Sovietologist, was more critical, arguing that Gorbachev was wrong in many of his fundamental judgments.

“Everything that he has accomplished that is positive, he has accomplished inadvertently--he didn’t intend for these things to happen,” Pipes said. “Gorbachev and his associates thought the Communist system was sound and that it merely needed reform and an infusion of fresh blood. They were dead wrong.”

Still, Pipes said, Gorbachev deserves credit for not halting his reforms when they began to escape his control. “He could have been a Deng Xiaoping (the Chinese Communist reformist, who has maintained dictatorial rule) and preserved the system for another five or 10 years,” Pipes said. “But he destroyed it. That undoubtedly is his place in history.”

The final judgment about Gorbachev’s place in history is going to be determined by the end of the story,” said Arnold Horelick of Santa Monica’s RAND Corp.

“If there’s a reasonably healthy and happy ending, the errors and mistakes and wasted opportunities will decrease in importance. But if we’re in for decades of violence, decline and decay, the net judgment of history will be that Gorbachev not only squandered opportunities but initiated that period of violence.

“Outside the Soviet Union, his place in history is secure as the man who, almost single-handedly, is responsible for ending the Cold War,” he said. “But inside the Soviet Union, the jury is still out.”