Gorbachev talks tough on world politics

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev enthralled an audience of more than 9,000 Thursday in Fort Collins with a political philosophy that puts the world first, not just one's own country.
Today's leaders should be targeting "the priorities of all mankind," urged Gorbachev, who halted a decades-long nuclear standoff when he stopped treating the United States as an enemy and ended dictatorship in the Soviet Union with dramatic moves toward democracy.
He decried the world's failure to embrace a unique opportunity at the end of the Cold War to find lasting peace. It should have turned the resources freed by the end of the arms race toward ending poverty and national humiliation, he said. Instead, he noted, those factors are now at the root of worldwide strife.
He also warned that the United States is making mistakes based on what he said was the false belief that President Ronald Reagan caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Reforms in his country were undertaken for internal reasons, he said at a news conference before his speech. "Based on that erroneous assumption, more mistakes are being made, including the war in Iraq," he said.
Gorbachev, looking older but more energetic and healthier than he looked during his last months in power, had the audience in his hands even before he began, winning a standing ovation when he was introduced in the McGraw Athletic Center at Colorado State University.
He talked of growing up in a village with no radio or electricity and of having his eyes opened when he went to work in the Kremlin and saw the country's problems.
At the end of the 1970s, productivity was one- third to one-fifth of that of the United States, and only 20 percent of goods were of Western quality. Meanwhile, "the country was suffocating because of lack of freedom," he said.
He looked at the world and saw that the greatest threat for everyone was nuclear war, he said. "We saw that because such a war can never be won, it must never be fought."
But it's today's problems that drive him now.
"Instead of using resources freed by the end of the Cold Ward to solve problems of poverty, the absolute number of poor has grown," he said.
Meanwhile, leaders of newly democratic countries also have failed to deal with such problems, and the result is a rollback of democracy in 80 countries, he said.
He cited the Internet and television for showing the 3 billion people living in poverty around the world. "Certainly this is something that disturbs people," he said, and the roots of terrorism can be found in this humiliation. Yet the world does not address this, he said.
"We cannot impose happiness," he said. "The Bolsheviks tried to do that" and they could no more force revolution on the world than the U.S. can force democracy on countries with tanks and missiles, he said to thunderous applause.
He suggested the United States must choose between leading by domination or by partnership. Growing anti-Americanism in Russia and elsewhere around the world "is not in the interest of Americans or the world," he said.
It was an admonition echoed in his last answer to a college student, probably not yet born when he began his momentous reforms. Asked for his advice to parents, Gorbachev said, "Don't lecture; teach by example."

Rocky Mountain News, April 15, 2005