Gorbachev calls United States ripe for ''perestroika of your own''

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sees parallels between the Soviet Union of 1985-91 and the United States today.
 

“The election of Barack Obama represents the fact that the American people as a whole want change,” said Gorbachev at a press conference before the first of his two lectures Monday as part of the Ringling College Library Association’s 2009 Town Hall series.

“Your country needs perestroika of course, a perestroika of your own.”

Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his efforts to end the nuclear arms race and Communist rule in Eastern Europe. His leadership coined the words perestroika (governmental restructuring) and glasnost (political openness) that led to fundamental changes in the Soviet Union and to the end of the Cold War.

Speaking in Russian with a translator in the wings of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, Gorbachev, 78, spent much of his allotted time reviewing the history of Russia in the 20th century, from the Russian Revolution in 1917 through the Lenin and Stalin eras and the decades leading up to his six-year role as president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.

When he became leader of the U.S.S.R. in March 1985, Gorbachev was riding a wave of political reform that began, he said, with Stalin’s death in 1953.

By the 1980s, the failure of communism was evident through the Soviet republic.

“The country was going through a very difficult period, a very stressful period. I understood that the country needed change and that someone had to assume responsibility and step forward in this risky project of changing our country,” he said.

“The challenges were enormously difficult, they were truly awesome... We needed to change the model, to change our way of life. And it was also very important to wake up the people, to bring the people into this process of change. We wanted people to understand that they were citizens, that they were the masters of their country, and this task was accomplished through the policy of glasnost. For the first time in centuries, the people were given a chance to be proud to speak openly, to say what they thought, to require the leaders to reply to their questions. I recall that time, even as we speak, I feel the emotions of that time.”

By 1988, Gorbachev had begun to implement significant reforms.

“We started to build a new system, a system with free elections, competitive elections, political pluralism, and a transition to a multiparty system,” he said. “We were able to say that the old system was relegated to the past.”

At the same time, Gorbachev was working to normalize relations with the United States and the world community.

“We recognized that the global confrontation, the Cold War, was not a normal state of affairs,” he said. The Soviets saw that the world was “interdependent and connected. The world requires real cooperation.”

Wearing a dark suit, a pale blue shirt and a navy pin-dotted tie, Gorbachev maintained a serious demeanor throughout much of his lecture, allowing a brief smile when he recalled the summit between himself and President Ronald Reagan in Geneva in November 1985, where his first impression of Reagan was that he was “a real dinosaur” and Reagan in turn described Gorbachev as a “die-hard Bolshevik.”

That summit, coming just two years after Reagan labeled the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Since leaving office, he has established the Gorbachev Foundation to address the challenges of the post-Cold War world and Green Cross International, an environmental organization to create a sustainable and secure future. He travels frequently to the United States to speak.

“My feeling toward the American people has improved,” he said. “I like Americans.”

HeraldTribune.com // 24.03.2009