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29 March 2013

Evgeny Lebedev. Lion in Winter: Mikhail Gorbachev's New Memoir

Still a maverick at 82, Mikhail Gorbachev talks about Putin’s Russia, his own legacy, and Raisa—the wife he loved and lost.

What hair is left has turned white. The face is fuller, and the famous birthmark has retreated. Now that he’s 82, age has finally caught up to Mikhail Gorbachev—no longer the Young Turk whose reformist zeal was so alien to the fusty officials of the Soviet state that he and his supporters were branded “Martians.”

“It’s simply a mess,” he says, sighing. “In the last five years I’ve had four operations. Major operations. It’s why we’re here now. I’ve come to speak openly and honestly. There’s no point beating about the bush, especially in my situation.”

Time has become his most precious commodity. Indeed, amid his medical difficulties, a rumor surged through the Twittersphere last May that he had died. Gorbachev was required to issue a statement insisting, like Mark Twain before him, that “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

I had followed his health problems closely, as we have known each other for more than a decade. We were introduced by my father, with whom Gorbachev co-owns the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta (I own the Independent and Evening Standard newspapers in the U.K., and I serve as the chairman of the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation). Gorbachev knew I had always been keen for an interview.

For our meeting—at his namesake foundation offices in Moscow—he’s dressed unfussily: tieless, his charcoal business suit paired with a maroon-striped shirt. He is talking breezily with his aides when I arrive; seeing me, he rushes over to throw an arm around my shoulder. Gorbachev has always been a great hugger; it is one of the many things that make people warm to him.

On the way to his study, we pass memorabilia—photographs of him with almost every political titan from the last 30 years, and awards, among them the Nobel Peace Prize. Directly behind his leather-covered desk, one portrait has pride of place: It is of Raisa, his wife, whom he lost to leukemia more than thirteen years ago. As he gazes up at it, years seem to melt away from the elder statesman’s face.

He and Raisa met as students at Moscow University. “One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening,” Gorbachev says, and his mouth forms a childlike smile. “And we walked like that for our whole life.”

It must be painful not to have her with him, I say.

He descends into silence. Memories of Raisa are fresh in his mind, as he has recently published a memoir in Russia, Alone with Myself, which includes a remarkable account of his 46-year romance with his late wife. Former general secretaries have never before written about such intimate matters.

But then Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev’s very public marriage was unprecedented. When her husband attended summits, there was glamorous Raisa by his side. She enjoyed the cut-and-thrust of political debate and would often point out to foreign visitors that as a university professor, she had greater academic credentials than her husband. Mikhail called her “my general” and claimed he discussed every decision with her. She always denied such influence, insisting she offered only spousal support.

“We’d come back from Australia,” he says, thinking of 1999, the year of Raisa’s death. “It was a great trip, an interesting one. Within a month she was feeling ill, and on September 20 she died. It turned out to be a very serious form of cancer, which still cannot be treated.”

He pulls the Alone with Myself manuscript from a drawer, wanting to read me a passage about Raisa’s last moments, how he and his daughter, Irina, stood by Raisa’s bed. Gorbachev beseeched her not to leave him—life could have no meaning for him if she did. It concludes, “I had never felt so lonely.”

Gorbachev admits that what he still finds the most hard to take is the feeling that he could have done more to help. The memory burdens him. “Life is always changing,” he finally says.

Gorbachev’s life has been defined by change. At the age of fifteen he was a combine-harvester driver, reportedly working 20-hour days on a Soviet collective farm. After graduating from university, he became the youngest provincial Communist Party head; then the youngest member of the Politburo. In 1985 he was appointed general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. It was a post that made him, with the U.S. president, one of the two most powerful people on the planet.

He remains a deeply controversial figure in Russia, where many of the older generation accuse him of having destroyed the USSR. It is an attitude arguably encouraged by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who has declared that the end of the Soviet empire was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century.” But Gorbachev introduced competitive elections, civil society, and the rule of law. He permitted free speech, political dissent, religious worship, and foreign travel. A greater set of achievements is hard to imagine—until you remember that this is the man whose political will also set Eastern Europe free.

Today, he’s still obsessed with politics and worries, as many of us do, about Putin’s resumption of the presidency and what it means for Russia.

The days after the presidential vote in 2012 were marked by street protests. These were on a scale unseen since the attempted 1991 coup d’état against Gorbachev himself. The state’s response has been unforgiving. Key opposition members have been rounded up and arrested.

I ask if the achievements of Gorbachev’s own rule are now being put into reverse. He does not even allow me to finish the question. They have not just been reversed, he insists, but “distorted or completely violated, destroyed.

“We need to restore a real democratic system. People need to be involved. We won’t solve the problems of developing the country, and strengthening it so that people can really feel [they are] their own masters, if we push the people out of politics.”

His hand grips the armrest of his chair. “I think [Putin] understands what the last elections showed,” he says. “The country was overtaken by a mood of protest.”

“You think he understands?” I ask.

“He understands. But he’s looking for a way out in the wrong direction.”

The most high-profile case has been the trial of the feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot. Its members were arrested after staging a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior when they called on the Virgin Mary to save Russia from Putinism.

Denied bail, the band members were placed on trial. Amnesty International named them prisoners of conscience. A Who’s Who of the world’s most famous musicians, including Paul McCartney, Madonna, and Björk, petitioned for their release.

While the trial was taking place, Gorbachev was unequivocal that they had been unfairly treated. “I don’t believe it’s a crime,” he told me. “We should release them and be done with it.”

In fact, two of the young women were sentenced to one of Russia’s penal colonies. Shortly after the verdict was announced, I asked Gorbachev what had been his reaction to the news.

“This kind of behavior is what makes the world afraid of us,” he told me.

Ask him what achievement he is most proud of, and his answer is unhesitating: ending the nuclear-arms race. When he was named general secretary, relations between the Cold War super-powers were at a nadir, with nuclear arsenals being built up at a terrifying rate. Then, at the Reykjavík summit in 1986, Gorbachev arrived at the negotiating table and offered to scrap all ballistic nuclear weapons in a decade. Ronald Reagan and his team did not know how to react, shocked by the level of cuts and refusing to abandon the dream of a “Star Wars” antimissile defense. Nonetheless, Gorbachev had broken the spell. The conference ended without resolution, but everyone knew something profound had occurred. In the press conference that followed, Raisa was seen weeping with joy. The way had been paved for the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which slashed both countries’ nuclear weapons.

“It was an amazing feeling,” Gorbachev recalls of Reykjavík. “We were proposing to give up trying to achieve superiority over each other in conventional weapons, too. In other words, to completely change the situation—to demilitarize the world.”

For a moment neither of us speaks. Then Gorbachev eases the silence with a story of encountering Margaret Thatcher a couple of years ago in London. “She was in good form, and so was I. We really had things to reminisce about. Suddenly she said, ‘Mikhail, wouldn’t you like to be in charge still?’ I said, ‘You know, Margaret, I’ve had it up to here. No.’ She said, ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ I thought, What a woman. What capacity. But she, of course, is a real politician.”

And what of his own legacy? How will Mikhail Gorbachev be remembered by his homeland?

He gives a snort. “They’ll remember. There’s nothing they can do about it.”

“Yes, they’ll remember you,” I say. “But how?”

His hands have been hanging in his lap, lines of deep blue veins clear through his skin. Now the hands are clenched into fists. He knows as well as I do how his time in office is viewed by a number of his countrymen.

“On the basis of the fact that I ended the Cold War,” he insists. “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.”

Pausing, he looks across to where a picture of his wife is displayed. Seeing it, he relaxes. His hands once again hang loose. He seems suddenly not to care about the politics and the ideologies and the vicious debates that will continue through time to define his legacy.

Instead he reaches over to tap me on the leg. “And also,” he says, “the fact that I was an OK kind of guy.”

Vogue Magazine, 27.03.2013