4 February 2022
Last year, the magazine Russia in Global Affairs published Mikhail Gorbachev’s essay Perestroika and New Thinking: A Retrospective, which evoked considerable interest and response among scholars and students of Perestroika.Below are links to the essay and some of the comments. Mikhail Gorbachev. Perestroika and New Thinking: A Retprospective More than three and a half decades have passed since the start of the process of change in the Soviet Union known throughout the world as perestroika. The debate about its meaning and its legacy continues with undiminished intensity. All these years, perestroika has been in my thoughts. I have been trying to find answers to the questions put to me by scholars, journalists and ordinary people in the letters that I receive. They want to understand perestroika—and that means it has not been relegated to the past. The experience and the lessons of perestroika remain relevant today, both for Russia and for the world. Perestroika went through various stages. We were searching, we had our illusions, we made mistakes, and we had our achievements. If given a chance to start anew, I would have done many things differently, but I am confident that historically perestroika was a just cause. This means two things: first, perestroika was necessary, and second, we were moving in the right direction. ** Comments on the Essay:
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The XXI century will be a сentury either of total all-embracing crisis or of moral and spiritual healing that will reinvigorate humankind. It is my conviction that all of us - all reasonable political leaders, all spiritual and ideological movements, all faiths - must help in this transition to a triumph of humanism and justice, in making the XXI century a century of a new human renaissance.
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