Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022)

A fascinating read in 2023, not least because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which helps remind us that Russia was "playing away" in Afghanistan when the book was written.

Gorbachev always came across as the reasonable one, the one trying to make changes (Thatcher's "I can do business with him" etc) but this lays open that he wasn't anything like that from a Western perspective, not "like us" at all. Leninism plays a huge part in the book and it's striking to still read about "the masses" from him and this late in the 20th Century - not to mention all the economic and growth plans he expounds about how they'll match the west by xx date.

And then the final section on armaments and especially nuclear arms and SDI is telling when we know how it'll all pan out - and one wonders whether he realised it too and the treaties were his way of finding a different way so that the Soviet union wouldn't lose.

It's a book partially for a domestic audience and partially for an international one and of course it's impossible to tell how much he actually wrote - it is obvious this is not the author scribbling a few notes in his study but is an official piece from the marketing department of the USSR, but overall I think a lot less of Gorbachev having read it, which I doubt was the objective.… (more)

When the first edition of this book was published, I was still in grammar school, very busy determining what I was going to do with the rest of my life, which university to pick, what interested me the most.

One of the reasons I started studying Russian, was the growing openness in Russia and Gorbachev being the one that more or less initiated all of it, I had to have / read this book of course.

It is quite a readable book, when you look past the 'I am not as good as I write I am" and the obvious political rhetorics that seem to be omnipresent in books like these.… (more)