Mikhail Gorbachev has told how he wants to be remembered for “ending the Cold War” and for being an “OK kind of guy”.
The 82-year-old former leader of the Soviet Union spoke about how he hopes to go down in history for paving the way for the reunification of Germany.
In an interview for US Vogue by Evgeny Lebedev, proprietor of the Evening Standard, the statesman also told of the “amazing feeling” when he surprised the West by offering at a summit nearly three decades ago to ditch ballistic nuclear weapons.
He also talked movingly about his wife Raisa and the loneliness that followed her death from leukaemia in 1999. Mr Gorbachev has already, like Mark Twain, had to dispel reports of his death as “greatly exaggerated”.
After having had four operations and in his advancing years, he stressed that he wants to “speak openly and honestly”. Asked how he would be remembered, he said: “On the basis of the fact that I ended the Cold War.
“That I opened up the opportunity for Germany to be unified. And because of that, the Germans today are our friends. And, of course, I think they’ll remember the great merits of glasnost and perestroika. There is something to remember.” He added: “And also the fact that I was an OK kind of guy.” Mr Gorbachev has his critics in Russia, particularly among older people, who have condemned him for the break up of the USSR. Russian president Vladimir Putin has described it as the biggest “geopolitical catastrophe” of the century.
But he defends his landmark reforms and says his achievements have been “distorted or completely violated, destroyed”. He remains critical of Mr Putin’s response to the “mood of protest” in Russia after the election last year, arguing that the president was “looking for a way out in the wrong direction”. The former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union spoke poignantly of his wife who he called “my general” and how he wished he could have done more to help her.
“Life is always changing,” said Mr Gorbachev who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and co-owns the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta with Mr Lebedev’s father Alexander. Remembering his student days with Raisa at Moscow University, he added: “One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.”
Evgeny Lebedev is chairman of the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. The full interview can be read in the US edition of Vogue out now (vogue.com).
