Remembering Gorbachev

In early January 1997, I met my boyhood hero. It was in the grounds of his wintry dacha outside Moscow. A man in late middle age, though still sprightly, he wore a padded anorak against the cold and a dark patterned scarf. Snow lay fat on the bony branches, with more softly falling.

His boots creaked over the frost on the pathways as we wandered and chatted: me in my broken Russian, he in his easily recognisable, gentle southern accent.

It had been five years since he had signed away the Soviet Union at a pen stroke, and a little longer since he had been de facto discarded from genuine power. There were no bodyguards in evidence. This was yesterday’s man and nobody’s prize.

But Mikhail Gorbachev still sounded like a man with a bear in the political fight: and a still-burning grudge against his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, the man who had engineered his downfall.