Perestroika

"If you look at Obama, part of what made him a huge success as a campaigner in opposition was his books, partly because of the way they described his background but also his political views. I cannot remember whether this book by Gorbachev, which came out in 1987 while he was General Secretary of the Communist Party, I cannot remember whether it had an impact at the time. It is called Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Now this is nothing like Obama’s Dreams from my Father at all. Insofar as it is autobiographical it describes meetings he has had with various different leaders round the world. This edition is 254 pages and it doesn’t let up. It’s almost like a never-ending speech. There is no light and shade and no ‘Hold on while I tell you about my childhood’, none of that at all. But the reason I wanted to pick it is that politicians with really big ideas are still the means by which a huge amount of change in the world is driven. It is fabulous that two Russian words, perestroika and glasnost, entered the global language as a result of one leader, Gorbachev, deciding he wanted to change his country. So this book is an incredibly well argued and interestingly written analysis of what he thought at that time, two years before he became president. He’s driving through domestic change, he’s having meetings with the Americans and other leaders around the world. He’s got an analysis of the third world, the Middle East. And the other interesting thing is – and if I bumped into him I would ask him – how much of the way this is written is tactical, and how much is genuinely what he believed at the time, because it is written from the point of view of protecting socialism. For example, he talks about glasnost saying, ‘The more openness there is in our social democracy, the more socialism there will be.’ There are lots of bits where he is talking up Marxist-Leninist thinking, and yet the impact of everything that he did – the end of the Cold War , the collapse of the Soviet Union, the arrival of a market economy in Russia – was against that. So I can remember reading it at the time and thinking it was a rare book with a really big idea in it. Obviously he was passionate about more openness and about political and economic restructuring, but I would love to know, did he want it to lead to the break up of the Soviet Union and all these other countries breaking away? Maybe he did, I don’t know. Did he imagine that he would have extraordinary political success but all this economic mess, which ultimately allowed Yeltsin to come in and say, ‘This guy is not moving fast enough’? Yes, maybe so. The other question you ask reading it now, is, as a political leader managing a massive process of change, to what extent is he actually using the book as part of that process? There is a lot in here to frighten the Communist horses, but the tone towards Lenin and Marx is very respectful and he’s maybe at points just slightly pulling his punches. Back then I think I reviewed it and I remember thinking this is a big figure and a big moment. But reading it now you think, wow, the world has changed so much, the former Eastern Bloc has changed so much, and a lot of it is because of this man, and you can see this book as such a building block towards it. Yet he is not terribly popular in his own country. OK, Russia is a much more open country today but the openness they’ve got is not exactly what he had in mind with glasnost. Yes, I’m sure of it. He is a global historical figure. My point here is we are talking about living people and how they become history. So we talk about Lincoln, where the historical judgement is overwhelmingly positive, and over time more and more books get written and a sort of truth develops. I was in Ireland last week and if you talk about what we [the Labour government under Tony Blair] did in Northern Ireland, that will become a very big part of history. But the other reason why I wanted to choose this, a book written in the first person by a political figure, is because I think their own words become incredibly important in the writing and analysis of history. A lot of the best stuff in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book is those letters. And I had forgotten the extent to which right from the start his vision was for a nuclear-free world where countries don’t go to war. Here’s a good bit: ‘I had a sharp debate on the issue with Mrs Thatcher . She claimed that for Britain nuclear weapons were the sole means of assuring its security in the event of a conventional war. This is a philosophy of doom… Have you ever thought what you look like in the eyes of world public opinion?’ So you get little moments of colour like that in amongst the philosophical stuff. A book in a leader’s own words, yes, but so different from Obama’s very writerly, very, should we even say, ‘bourgeois individualist’ books. But back then, there was already a sense of a cult of the personality about Gorbachev, which was probably frowned upon. Obama was an exception till he became president but there is such a downer on politicians. If you look at that period so much of what happened was down to one man having a big vision."