EXCERPTS OF GORBACHEV’S ESSAY- IN MEMORIAM

From the very beginning, perestroika had an overarching theme, a guiding idea that defined it at every stage and provided the framework for our thinking. Perestroika was meant for the people. Its goal was to emancipate the human being, to give people ownership of their lives and of their country.

The system that we inherited was based on the Communist Party’s total control. After Stalin’s death, the regime he created renounced massive repressions, but its essence remained unchanged. The system distrusted the people, refusing to believe that they could act independently as makers of history. The leaders of perestroika had a different view: we believed that giving people freedom would unchain their initiative and creative energy.

Hence, perestroika was a wide-ranging humanist project. It was a break with the past, with the centuries when the state—autocratic and then totalitarian—dominated over the human being. It was a breakthrough into the future. This is what makes perestroika relevant today; any other choice can only lead our country down a dead-end road.

The core of New Thinking is the proposition that humankind’s common interests and universal human values must be the overarching priority in an increasingly integrated, interdependent world. New Thinking does not negate national, class, corporate or other interests. However, it places at the forefront the interest of saving humanity from the threat of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.

We refused to consider world development through the prism of the struggle of two opposing social systems. We revised our concept of security and formulated the task of demilitarizing international politics and the principle of reasonable defense sufficiency at lower levels of armaments.

Overall, New Thinking in foreign as well as in domestic policy was an attempt to think and act in accordance with basic common sense.

The old Russian word glasnost holds many meanings, among them the openness of society, freedom of speech and government accountability. For the leaders of perestroika, glasnost meant speaking truth to the people. We needed to start telling the truth about the state of affairs in our country and about the world around us. Glasnost also meant receiving feedback from the people, who were now able to say what they thought—including, increasingly, things that the authorities did not like to hear.

Glasnost meant upholding the people’s right to know by reducing secrecy and “classified information” to a reasonable minimum. Glasnost evolved into real freedom of speech. Glasnost made it possible to discuss any subject. Without it, people would not have been able to speak openly about human rights, the real freedom of conscience, economic freedom, and market economics.

Perestroika proved that the normal development of a society and the proper functioning of a government is impossible in an environment of total secrecy. Instead, what is needed is openness; freedom of information; freedom to express one’s political, religious and other convictions and views; and freedom to criticize without constraints or exceptions.

Even the most difficult issues must be resolved by political means, without the use of force, without bloodshed.

 My first meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, which took place in Geneva in November 1985, broke the ice that had been building up for decades. This happened despite the fact that after our first conversation I, speaking to members of the Soviet delegation, called him not just a conservative but “a real dinosaur,” and we later learned that Reagan had called me “a die-hard Bolshevik.” And yet, two factors were crucial: responsibility and intuition. We both felt that, however difficult our dialogue, we needed to persist.

The main results of the Geneva summit with Ronald Reagan are well known but are worth repeating here. We signed a statement that declared: the leaders of the USSR and the United States agree “that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Furthermore, the two sides “will not seek to achieve military superiority.” We also agreed to expand exchanges between our countries—both people-to-people and youth contacts—and to resume airline flights.

The world in which we live today, I stated, is radically different from how it was at the beginning or even in the middle of this century. “The new realities are changing the entire world situation. The differences and contradictions inherited from the past are diminishing or being displaced. But new ones are emerging. Some of the past differences and disputes are losing their importance. But conflicts of a different kind are taking their place. Life is making us abandon established stereotypes and outdated views. It is making us discard illusions. The very concept of the nature and criteria of progress is changing.”

We have entered an era when progress will be shaped by universal human interests. Our ideal is a world community of states which are based on the rule of law and which subordinate their foreign policy activities to law.

We awakened society, achieving what we had set out to do in the preceding years of perestroika: involve the people in the political process. Free elections brought to the fore many new, interesting people and clarified the positions of those strata of society of whom we had previously had a very vague and sometimes misleading view that had been distorted by political dogma.

On the eve of 1991, I addressed the citizens of the country, saying: “The coming year will be special. At stake is the future of our multi-ethnic state. The peoples of this country have been living together for centuries. Perhaps we now realize more than ever before that we must not live behind fences that would separate us. To find a way out of the crisis and firmly follow the road of renewal, we must work together.”

By the time I met with the leaders of the G7, we were ready for serious discussion. Perestroika had liberated us from the dogmas that had stood in the way of recognizing that a modern, efficient economy cannot exist without private property, economic freedom, and market economics.

Our concept of integrating our country into the global economy assumes the need for radical changes in the USSR as well as reciprocal steps by the West, such as lifting legislative and other restrictions on economic and technical ties with the USSR, the participation of the USSR in international economic organizations, and so on.”

For me, the main theme of these talks was the prospect of shaping a new system of comprehensive security, which for the first time in history would be the product of a common approach to world affairs, based on new criteria that had already undergone a kind of stress test.

Here are the real results of perestroika: the end of the Cold War; unprecedented agreements on nuclear disarmament; human rights and the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion and emigration; contested elections on a multi-party basis; and, most importantly, we brought the process of change far enough that it could not be turned back.

 In politics, triumphalism gives bad advice. It is, among other things, immoral. There is a need to bring together morality and politics. In a global world, relations among states must be governed not just by the norms of international law but also by certain rules of behavior rooted in universal moral principles. Such rules of behavior should include restraint, consideration of the interests of all sides, and consultations and mediation if the situation deteriorates and a dangerous crisis is looming. Many crises could have been averted if the parties directly involved and, to an even greater degree, outside parties followed such rules of behavior.

As we ended the Cold War, the world community formulated a set of concrete tasks to be addressed by the new generation of political leaders. These include eliminating nuclear weapons, overcoming mass poverty in developing countries, providing equal opportunities for everyone in education and healthcare, and reversing the degradation of the environment. Yet the United Nations has had to recognize that progress on these tasks has been insufficient.