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Mikhail Gorbachev From 1985 to 1991, Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. This has been a cruel and bloody century, but also a time of enormous breakthroughs and discoveries, marked by attempts of very different kinds to change the fundamental nature of our civilization. You could almost say that things were finally reaching the denouement in a play that had been performed down the centuries. We had come to a point where everything could have ended in a catastrophe.
When I became the leader of the Soviet Union, I was firmly persuaded that the model of society the communists had forced on our country was not working. I had illusions that I could improve this model, a notion that had ended in failure for Khrushchev, Kosygin and Andropov before me, but I soon saw that this system put up resistance to any kind of change. Society was suffocating from a lack of freedom, deprived of any social energy. All this convinced me that the system needed to be changed-and then this idea led to the broader concept that change was needed not just in our country but also in international affairs. This is how those concepts, perestroika and the new way of thinking, were born. I said then that we were living in one contradictory but essentially integrated world in which we were all dependent on one another.
PHOTO CREDIT: NIKOLAI IGNATIEV-MATRIX |
