Q and A with Mikhail Gorbachev
The former Soviet president on autocracy, hints of a new Cold War -- and that Louis Vuitton ad.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, 76, leaned against the glass window pane on the third floor of Cambridge's Charles Hotel last week and surveyed the icy stone walk below.
"What if I press too hard and fall through?" he mused.
At the peak of his fame, pressing too hard and falling through was Gorbachev's life in a nutshell. His perestroika and glasnost reforms in the 1980s led to secessionist uprisings, which he then quashed with tanks. His effort to introduce political freedoms and lift the Iron Curtain between the Soviet bloc and the West led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a new, free Eastern Europe - and then to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev had worked so hard to preserve.
Gorbachev was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War. But now he sees even those achievements eroding as the relations between the United States and Russia become increasingly icy. In response to Washington's plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, Moscow is threatening to pull out of a treaty banning medium-range nuclear missiles which Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan signed 20 years ago. Last month, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin suspended Russia's participation in another pact Gorbachev signed as president: the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.
For years, Gorbachev received little public attention, dividing his time between lecturing abroad, promoting action on global warming through his Geneva-based Green Cross International, and financing the treatment of leukemia in Russia. But his recent appearance in an advertisement for Louis Vuitton luggage sparked new controversy.
The photograph depicted Gorbachev being driven in a limo past the remains of the Berlin Wall. Next to him sits a piece of LV luggage with a magazine sticking out. The magazine headline reads, in Russian: "Litvinenko's Murder - They Wanted to Give Up a Suspect for $7,000." This is a reference to the former KGB officer and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who died after being poisoned in London by sushi laced with the radioactive isotope polonium-210, and who, on his deathbed, accused Putin of murdering him.
Ideas interviewed Gorbachev the week Putin's United Russia party won the majority of seats in Russia's lower house of parliament in an election that many critics said was rigged. Gorbachev was in the area to speak at an international conference on nuclear weapons at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
IDEAS: In the West, you are often hailed as the man who helped end the Cold War and the Soviet Union. Yet you endorsed Putin's United Russia in the parliamentary elections, and have spoken in support of Putin - the man who has called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Why?
GORBACHEV: I did not help bring along the end of the Soviet Union! I did play a role in ending the Cold War, but it wasn't me alone.
Without perestroika, without reshaping our foreign policy, modernization, ending the nuclear arms race - we wouldn't have been able to bring about the end of the Cold War. I didn't do it all myself. But I participated{hellip} [He chuckles.] I am pleased to share in this accomplishment.
As for the Soviet Union, it could have been preserved. It broke up because of internal political processes and the struggle for power within Russia, the betrayal [of me] by [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin{hellip} Putin is right, the union should have been preserved. [The collapse of the Soviet Union] influenced not only our internal processes but also had an impact on the global processes. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist we got a war in Europe. Instead of the Cold War we had a hot war, in Yugoslavia. And that is just one example.
IDEAS: How do you view the latest developments of relations between Russia and the West? You said recently that you see the US plan to deploy a missile defense shield in Central Europe as targeting Russia, not Iran, as the United States claims. Do you see your achievements in ending the Cold War being depleted?
GORBACHEV: What we see is the beginning of a new arms race. The United States has a super-large military budget; its military budget is even larger than it was during the Cold War.
IDEAS: What about your comment regarding the true purpose of the proposed missile defense shield?
GORBACHEV: There is truth in this. It's too early to talk about Cold War, but I think we are seeing some frost.
IDEAS: You have criticized the arrest, during Russia's parliamentary election campaign, of opposition leader Garry Kasparov, the crackdown on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. You are a shareholder in Novaya Gazeta, whose writer, Anna Politkovskaya, was killed and her murder remains unsolved. Are you worried about where Russia is headed? How do you respond to people who say Putin is running a dictatorship?
GORBACHEV: They are mistaken. Maybe someone is telling them to voice such criticism. In recent years Russia has begun not only to grow its muscles but to flex them, as well. But Russia is not a threat to other countries.
As for internal measures, yes, I criticized the arrest of Kasparov for five days, I believe that was unjustified. But Putin has not crossed the line beyond which Russia would become an authoritarian regime. Putin is trying to implement reforms in a large country. I, too, tried to implement reforms in a large country, and sometimes I had to resort to authoritarian methods. Often authoritarian measures are unavoidable.
The 21st century is becoming a century of reforms. Changes of such magnitude cannot go without sporadic authoritarian steps. We still have to be very attentive to what is happening and fight for the strengthening of democracy.
IDEAS: OK, I have to ask you about that Louis Vuitton ad. What was that magazine cover all about?
GORBACHEV: I did two ads in 10 years and each time there's so much hullabaloo! I don't think that this was a setup. All the magazines were writing about it, but I don't think that someone was trying to set me up. Why would they want to do that? I didn't even know what was in that magazine. I still don't know. They just stuck some magazines in the bag, that's it.
Anna Badkhen is a Globe reporter. She served as Moscow bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle from 2002 to 2004. She can be reached at abadkhen@globe.com.
