Democracy for breakfast

Twenty years after perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev says the US needs a dose of Russian medicine, writes Nick Paton Walsh

     Twenty years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled perestroika and with it the beginning of the end of the cold war, forcing what was then the world's second superpower to take stock of the gap between its grand designs and crumbling infrastructure.
     But as his 75th birthday passes, "Gorby" has a clear message for his former Iron Curtain adversary. "America needs its own perestroika", he said, suggesting it is the United States that now needs radical reforms and self assessment.
     "The United States has not found its role after it became the only superpower. Until it gets rid of the victor's complex, it will make more mistakes. The younger Bush made a big error in Iraq."
In an interview to mark both his birthday and the 20th anniversary of the speech he made to the communist party congress announcing the first elements of perestroika, Mr. Gorbachev echoed opinions broadly shared in Russian society.
     He defended his cold war legacy and remained intensely suspicious of the west. He claimed British intelligence helped falsify data over weapons of mass destruction and that the invasion of Iraq was "a blow against the Security Council and international law and now we have a terrible degradation of the situation in the Middle East".
     He said the biggest threat to Russia's political stability in the next two years, as a successor is sought to replace Vladimir Putin in 2008, would come from outside the country because the west wanted to keep Russia weak.
     Russian officials have echoed such concerns, citing western support for non-governmental organisations as one possible way the US and EU might try to influence their domestic politics through fomenting civil dissent.
    Mr. Gorbachev said: "There are those - not only the US but also our closest western friends - who like to keep Russia in a semi-strangulated state. Sometimes they are ... afraid of competitors. As Russia becomes stronger suddenly our friends in the west begin to get excited.
     "'Maybe they are again building an empire?' And you think this is threatening? How do you think we feel, having all these [US] military bases that are being deployed closer and closer to our borders?" he asks.
     Some Russians dislike Mr. Gorbachev and see him as the man who foolishly gave away the USSR's superpower status to the US, sparking a decade of economic and political chaos.
     Yet on his 75th birthday last week he was congratulated by Vladimir Putin for making "the changes that allowed our country to make a decisive step towards democratic reforms". The president was not, however, invited to attend a dinner at a Moscow restaurant to mark the occasion.
    At times, Mr. Gorbachev voiced the same suspicions and criticisms of western policy heard from some Kremlin apparatchiks today. He heavily criticised the Bush administration's new security doctrine as "in complete contradiction to what we agreed with Reagan".
     The pair historically agreed there could not be victors in nuclear war. "But now they [the US] are saying again that nuclear arms can be used as a first-strike weapon," he added.
     Mr. Gorbachev dismissed western criticism at how democracy is "backsliding" under Mr Putin's authoritarian rule, during which the Kremlin has replaced the election of regional governors with presidential appointment and held two elections criticised by western observers.
     "All you westerners are torturing us with this question [about Russian democracy]," he said. "This is a transition from a state that is moving from totalitarianism to democracy. Democracy is not a thing that can be delivered in the morning in a cup, like a man brings coffee to his wife or mistress."
     He expressed his exasperation at the west's black and white approach to Russia's democratic development. "Certainly there are some authoritarian flashbacks, some rolling back from democracy, but do you think we have to shoot ourselves because of it? Nothing can drag us back to the past. The population has felt the taste of liberty."
     He said the Americans took 200 years to build their democracy, but expected Russia to do it in 200 days. "I tell the Americans: 'we are more capable than you are. I think we'll do it in 20 years - 10 times quicker than you have done'."
     Speaking in the plush offices that his Gorbachev Foundation shares with a Moscow bank, he said the corrupt privatisations and currency defaults of the 1990s were the entire fault of the "Yeltsin era".
He said Mr. Yeltsin left Russia to the peril of the free market, allowing a sell-off of state assets that was "simply theft. We'll deal with the consequences... for a long time in the future."
     He praised Mr. Putin for stabilising the situation. "He inherited chaos and disintegration everywhere," he added, referring to the increasing autonomy of Russia's regions that occurred towards the end of the 90s when Chechnya had been granted independence.
     "I think that all the errors done during Putin's term would be forgotten, but never the fact that he has stopped the disintegration of the country."
    Indeed, his most overt criticism of Mr. Putin was for being too soft on four British diplomats accused in January of using a hi-tech transmitter hidden in a rock to spy on Russia.
     "Putin decided to do nothing. I would act differently. You know we had a war with Margaret Thatcher - who could expel more spies? I let her know that I'd take it to the end."
     He described the alleged spying as "impudent" and said: "Britain - you've got used to doing anything you like without being punished."

"Guardian", March 8, 2006