LAMB: You say that an interview you had with Time magazine and then with French television were the first steps toward glasnost, openness. Can you tell us why they were?
GORBACHEV: Because it was unusual. Before me, that never happened. If they answered questions, they did that in writing. They received questions in writing, and then they answered questions and gave them to reporters. But there were never the kind of exchanges in which I was ready to engage. And I
was new to that thing. It was not easy. It was not simple for me then. We've
been talking for almost an hour now, and I liked this atmosphere; I like this talk. It's not important for me whether or not the camera is on. But in
the past, when I was beginning, when I saw the camera, I first became almost
speechless.
It took all that changed to change that. So glasnost began with the general secretary. And the general secretary who spoke sometimes in awkward phrases,
who spoke sometimes not maybe very properly, but he spoke out, he expressed his emotions and his thoughts, and that too struck many people as very unusual, shocked many people. That began in Leningrad, where I went right after the election as general secretary, and I spoke to people and someone taped it. And then they showed the entire tape on TV, you know? They didn't intend to do that initially, but then that tape was shown, and all people in
the Soviet Union were kind of set in motion. That was the beginning.