All his contemporaries have since also been eclipsed: Ronald Reagan by Alzheimer’s disease, George Bush by his son, Kohl by the smog of corruption, Thatcher by failing health and changing times.
None of their falls, however, was as precipitous as that of Mikhail Gorbachev: one day the Soviet Union’s first president, the next — Christmas Day, 1991 — its last. The statesman who charged himself with reforming the USSR instead witnessed its dissolution, the coming to power of a despised rival and the abandonment of perestroika, his daring project to construct democracy out of 70 years of tyranny.
His sacking, and the sacking of the Soviet Union, looked like blows from which he would never recover, and when he stood for the presidency in 1996 he was floored again, this time by democracy itself. Gorbachev, avatar of the prophet without honour in his own land, won barely 1 per cent of the vote.
So he busied himself on speaking tours, set up a restaurant in Moscow and filmed a commercial for Pizza Hut. Now, however, his drunken, ailing successor, Boris Yeltsin, is gone (though reportedly in improving health) and his heir, Vladimir Putin, has restored the Gorbachev project. By the svelte, burnished look of him, its author seems restored as well.
We meet early in a busy, four-star hotel in London, the Westminster Thistle, that even its management, who suspected the fax was a hoax, were surprised he chose. The lobby throngs with plain-clothes policemen attending an IT conference. At the front desk, one asks to borrow a pair of scissors because he has discovered chewing gum in his hair.
Amid this undiplomatic confusion, the former Soviet General Secretary suddenly materialises, smaller, younger than you expect, the birthmark on his forehead less distracting beneath his tan. He is accompanied by Pavel Palazchenko, his interpreter and media adviser, instantly recognisable from summits past. I ask Palazchenko how long has he worked for Gorbechev. “For ever,” he says.
Lacking ceremony, Gorbachev would be happy to talk right here, but the hotel’s chief concierge, a well-impressed Irishman, finds a suitably oak-panelled room upstairs. The photographer asks Gorbachev if he would mind sitting on the sofa. He does: at 71, he must be allowed to sit where he likes, and chooses a straight-backed chair. Although he has no English, he has a gift for one-to-one communication: he looks me in the eye, smiles frequently and, at the end, shakes my hand warmly, three times. The only perverse conversational trait is that he refers to himself as “Gorbachev”, as if talking about a third-party figure already sunk into history.
He has spent the previous day in Parliament talking about the disposal of decommissioned nuclear and chemical weapons, the legacy of the arms race that he helped to end. The G8 Summit last month pledged Ј13.2 billion towards ensuring that they do not fall into the wrong hands but, says Gorbachev, implementation is another matter. As the president of the environmental pressure group Green Cross International, he is seeing through his mission to rid the world of the nuclear cosh poised above its head.
I ask if his advocacy is not also his way of expiating Russia’s guilt for its crimes against the environment. “I do not feel personally guilty because when I was in charge I did my best to address environmental problems and to make it possible for the country to address these problems,” he replies.
Was the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986 handled properly? “In terms of the clean-up it was handled excellently. Because there was no precedent for such a disaster, we mobilised every force to handle the accident, including the designers of the power plant. But initially the situation was extremely unclear.”
The lack of clarity was partly deliberate. It was four days before Moscow newspapers acknowledged the accident in a two-line statement.
The subsequent clamour for information was a turning point for the emerging policy of glasnost (transparency) and, says Gorbachev, the environmentalists were the first to take advantage. The Soviet Government subsequently mothballed or closed more than a thousand industrial facilities. “The environment is something I have felt very close to all my life,” he says.
Had he enjoyed the countryside as a boy, I ask, imagining the young Mikhail riding through the Steppes, the wind pelting through hair he had yet to lose. But Gorbachev was born to a peasant family in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, invaded by the Nazis during the war. Forced to work in the fields, he did not enjoy a Wordsworthian relationship with the land; rather, he witnessed nature’s fury when a dust storm, the result of reckless overtilling, swept the landscape. “So when I was 15 I first faced an environmental problem.”
By then he was the assistant to a combine-harvester operator. His way out and up was politics. As he ascended from the Young Communist League to first secretary of the party in Stavropol city, to regional first secretary and thence to Moscow and, in 1980, the Politburo, his diehard communism mellowed. By the time he succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader in 1985, he was a reformer. When he left office six years later he was a social democrat whose views, as elucidated in his last book, On My Country and the World, would hardly offend a single Labour MP, save for their moderation.
For a while he carried his people and party with him but, as the Berlin Wall came down and Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the rest raced for independence, it became clear that his tinkering was causing the Soviet machine to collapse into its component parts.
I ask whether, had there been no perestroika, the Soviet Union would be here today. “Yes, yes,” he says.
It is a remarkable thought. “But I think it’s not the kind of cause-and-effect relationship that you suggest. Perestroika as such was not the cause of the breakdown of the system. The cause of the break-up was that, within the process of perestroika, we did not act early enough to reform the union.”
In his book he locates the immediate cause as the betrayal by Yeltsin, who reneged on his mission to cajole Ukraine into signing a new treaty with Russia: “The President of Russia and his entourage in fact sacrificed the union to his passionate desire to accede to the throne in the Kremlin.”
Was it shaming to live under such a successor? “Things turned sour. Yeltsin was my mistake in personnel policy. Years ago I appointed him and Yeltsin is the kind of person who should not be in power, in my opinion.
“It is true that he continued along the path of moving from the communist system to a market system, a continuation of what we started under perestroika, but his only work was to destroy. He is not a builder and, faced with this tremendous problem of reforming a huge country, could not come up with anything intelligent; instead he threw a country that was totally unprepared and a people who were unprepared into his kind of revolution, and did so with (staff) who had no experience of economics.
“The West applauded Yeltsin because all the West cared about was that he was a courageous fighter against communism, but as a result of his policies we had the breakdown of the currency, of the economy and the disorganisation of the infrastructure.”
But the people blamed Gorbachev? “People blamed me, above all, for not stopping Yeltsin and, yes, they were right; he should have been stopped.
“But when you say the people of Russia blame Gorbachev, I think that a lot of this is based on a stereotyped view — and younger people, even you, fall prey to these stereotypes. You may not known that in 1985/86/87/88/89 and half of 1990 Gorbachev continued to have the highest rating in all the opinion polls in the Soviet Union. Yelstin was No 2, far behind on 20 to 25 per cent, whereas Gorbachev continued to have 70 to 80 per cent during all those years.”
These sound petty statistics falling from Gorbachev’s lips. British politicians affect never to read opinion polls: the last person I interviewed with such a detailed, revisionist memory of his ratings was a game-show host.
But when the fall came, was it not painful? “It hurt because I had not completed the process of perestroika.”
In Putin’s Russia, perestroika has lately begun again. The tax system has been overhauled, reformers put in the Cabinet. Last month a law was passed allowing Russians to buy and sell farmland. Relations with the West have improved further, with Putin backing President Bush’s war on terrorism and looking increasingly likely to accept America’s National Missile Defence system. Economically, the rouble’s devaluation in 1998 boosted trade. The foreign debt is shrinking. Rising oil and gas prices make Russia a possible future rival to Opec.
Overall, although he was not his first choice for president, Gorbachev admires Putin’s performance. I say what worries the West are Putin’s credentials as a democrat. Human Rights Watch has made serious allegations of war crimes committed by Russians in the rebellious province of Chechnya, a hideous conflict that has evolved into the sort of “dirty war” in which people are “disappeared”. Meanwhile, at home, Putin suppresses the media where he can.
Gorbachev says he was asked the same question by President Bush when he visited him two Aprils ago. “I said to the American President, ‘Do you think that George Bush is more interested in Russia succeeding as a democracy, or Russia is more interested in Russia succeeding as a democracy?’ It seems to me quite clear who has the inherent interest. So my next question I ask my American friend is: ‘It took the United States 200 years to evolve to its current success as a democracy. Why do you want us to do the same in 200 days?’”
The Russian media will be only as good as the current state of Russian democracy, and reform is under way, he says. Some of the media is flourishing, some is under the thumb of regional governors, and much is in the hands of partisan private owners. He asks us not to mistake Russia’s media for the BBC.
I say I am saddened that the inventor of glasnost does not speak up unequivocally for a press freedom. He says I am wrong. He has always done so.
And Chenchnya? “Again, compare it. Compare it with Northern Ireland. This is something that has taken you 25, 30 years to normalise. And it has not yet been solved. Once again you are asking Russians to solve a problem in 25 months.”
In his 1999 book, Gorbachev wrote: “The Union could have been preserved. A new union can be created.”
It reads almost as an example of Russian nostalgia for a lost homeland. But today he says that any restoration of the Soviet Union would be “a very reactionary” idea. Instead he proposes that the independent states forge a series of bilateral and multilateral understandings on security, trade and transport. The network might resemble the European Community before it became the European Union. Russia, meanwhile, could become an associate member of the existing EU, taking as a model the more-than-spectator status it enjoys at Nato.
But the Nato link was, I say, born of a crisis: September 11. “That is true in terms of timing, but the most important thing was the policy choice made by President Putin, the policy choice of rapprochement. Without that, co-operation would not have been possible. But I think that Europe, for the sake of its own ‘European House’, needs closer relations with Russia. This would also help Europe to increase its status and role in the world.”
There is time left only to ask about his oldest ally, the woman with whom he discussed “everything”. Raisa Gorbachev died of leukaemia three years ago, aged 67. How long, I ask, does it take for a man to recover from the death of a soulmate? His voice slows and his eyes shine.
“To me that is a very difficult question. Time is passing but the pain has not become any less. As the years pass, a person has a lot of problems and those problems are aggravated for me by being alone.
“It is so painful that she passed away at such an early age. It is a tremendous loss and a loss that should not have happened. Even though I have a very strong nervous system, that was very difficult for me to take. Next year would have been our golden anniversary, 50 years together.”
He has just visited a nursery in Italy where a new white and pink rose has been created and named after her. He is thinking of planting a bush at her grave, or at his dacha.
I can tell that this was a loss greater than the presidency. “Yes, indeed. In a democratic country, for a president to lose office is normal. Of course, they did it with me in a way that was not normal but, nevertheless, I am a believer in democratic procedures; presidents have to be replaced from time to time.”
I check to see whether he is going to smile at this last bathos, but he does not.
Ten years on from his fall, the wounds — and Russian democracy — are both still, perhaps, a little too fresh for that.