MIn mid-August 2001, a man called the Moscow office of the FAZ and asked if I would like to interview Mikhail Gorbachev. What a question! Of course I wanted. The man introduced himself as an employee of the Gorbachev Foundation and gave a date when I would be expected there. Gorbachev will have an hour. At that time I had just read Gorbachev’s memoirs (admittedly, I had skimmed through some passages of the 1216-page thick rind rather than read them), but I would not have had a lack of questions even without reading them.
One topic I was keen to discuss with Gorbachev was the role of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in post-Soviet Russia, which I had studied a lot while living in Kyiv and later in St. Petersburg. In the mid-1990s, when rabid mafia capitalism reigned supreme in Russia, but healing back to democracy still seemed possible, Solzhenitsyn repeatedly sharply criticized Gorbachev. His policy of openness did not pave the way for freedom of speech, but for freedom of shamelessness, said Solzhenitsyn. As a consequence of the failed communist experiment, Russia must acknowledge that it has lost the twentieth century. Gorbachev didn’t want to put up with that. “Solzhenitsyn is particularly fighting against glasnost. Glasnost, he says, has spoiled everything. And I say that without glasnost, nothing would be the same today, including Solzhenitsyn.” Without glasnost, Gorbachev sneered, “Solzhenitsyn would still be chopping wood in Vermont today. When Alexander Issaevich speaks about politics, his memory and sense of reality sometimes fail him.”
