Conversations with Gorbachev
On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar were friends for half a century, since they first crossed paths as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet world politics.
In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. This book is the product of that “thinking out loud” process. It is an absorbing record of two friends trying to explain to one another their views on the problems and events that determined their destinies. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to “save socialism” to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Only a little more than 10 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev was the one of the world's two most pivotal leaders. Now, more often than not, he appears to be a historical relic. This volume, which features an extended, dry conversation between Gorbachev and former Czech dissident Mlynar, does nothing to dispel the perception that events have passed Gorbachev by. The two cover the similarities in their biographies: the attraction of socialist ideas when they were both young, their rise to power in their respective Communist parties. But it's the differences in their lives that are most striking. After the Prague Spring of 1968, Mlynar became a dissident, first leaving his post in the Communist Party, then fleeing to the West. Gorbachev, on the other hand, remained a Soviet apparatchik, rising to become party secretary and then the Soviet president in 1990. As they reminisce, Mlynar presses his longtime friend to explore other possibilities: that he could have taken a more critical stance within the Soviet Union before he began to try to reform it, that he might have taken steps to prevent the U.S.S.R.'s dissolution, which occurred on his watch. Despite Mlynar's pressing, Gorbachev is unwilling to probe behind his well-known views on this the U.S.S.R.'s collapse occurred, Gorbachev contends, because of the "vindictiveness of the reactionary forces and the excessive revolutionism of the radicals" or on other issues, leaving this book with little new or surprising to offer.
