For example, the following passages in your article read very strangely: ‘Is it not obvious’, you write, ‘that the extolling and justification of our Perestroika and Yeltsin’s shelling of his own parliament addresses not to the past but to the future [sic]? That this is a model, literally a model, for a new wave of absolute moral negativism towards what is happening now, and that this wave of absolute moral negativism is already being called by many “Perestroika-2”?’
Since all these troubles, it would appear from your article, are extolled and commended by Leon Aron, it would seem that he and others like him are seeking to bring chaos, immorality and sedition down on us again today. You are so eager to shout ‘Stop, thief!’ and erect a new Iron Curtain, but I am wholly convinced that a much more promising way forward is to cleanse and renew our state authorities, as was only recently declared necessary from the highest office in the land.
The climate of opinion that leads to movements like Perestroika arises less at the volition of seditious troublemakers than as a consequence of the failure of a political system and ruling elite to keep abreast of the demands of a developing society and the maturing civic consciousness of a population. To be unable to recognize the steady rise of civic protest in conditions of political stagnation, to attempt to write it off as due to moral and legal ‘inadequacies’ on the part of your ‘overly demanding fellow citizens’ is dangerously short-sighted and profoundly mistaken. That way we really can expect dramatic upheavals and revolutions.
As regards the assessment of Gorbachev’s Perestroika given in your article about chaos-devoid-of-morality, in the interests of objectivity I will permit myself to quote some rather different writing and acknowledgements from an official government telegram I received. It reads:
‘Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
Please accept my cordial best wishes on your 75th birthday. Everyone knows how much effort you put into enabling our country to take a historic decision to turn in the direction of democratic reform, for the emergence of civil society and the construction of a state living under the rule of law.
I wholeheartedly wish you good health and inexhaustible reserves of optimism and faith in the future. I wish you success in all you undertake, and happiness and prosperity for you and your family.
V. D. Zorkin
President of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation
2 March 2006’
What has prompted you so abruptly and diametrically to change your judgements and assessment? May it perhaps be the fact that in recent years I have begun to publicly criticize the governing party, which embodies the worst bureaucratic features of the Soviet Communist Party and has turned into a mechanism for maintaining its own monopoly of power, a machine that mindlessly endorses whatever decisions and orders come down to it from on high?
Dear Valeriy Dmitrievich, Your Honour! Do believe me when I say that I have written everything above solely in the interests of truth and justice. It is nothing personal. I do not indulge in anger or hold grudges. I wish you good health and hope you have a wonderful New Year and Christmas.
Some letters of support in recent years
I find I really want to thank you for the changes that have come about in the modern world because of you.
The world is much more open than it was: the opportunities we have today are incomparably greater than they were before 1985, and that is particularly true of former Soviet citizens.
I know what I am talking about, because I was born in 1954.
Thank you for your courage, your sense of responsibility, and all the concern you continue to show. In the USSR, life was not so much behind an Iron Curtain but like being in a box with no windows.
Naturally, the break-up of relations within society had a severe impact on people’s lives, but that was unavoidable. On the good side, today’s and future generations gained real prospects for the future.
Hello, dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
Perhaps you do not need this, but I want to write a few lines to you.
I and my family have always supported you, from when you first came to power and to the present day.
I want to express my opinion about the mock ‘trials’ of Gorbachev. They were contemptible and dishonest towards you during the Perestroika years and still are today.
We Slavs, Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians have evolved a tradition where everyone praises a person to the skies when he comes to power, and then when he retires many spit at his back. It is a shameful tradition.
I believe that raising the question of whether Gorbachev is ‘guilty or not guilty’ is wrong. How can you presume to judge a person who gave freedom (free speech, freedom of movement) to the people of the Soviet Union, ultimately just the right to choose? A president of the USSR who did everything possible, and more, to reform the Union, to preserve everything that was good in it? Then came the putsch, the coup attempt in August 1991, with all its consequences (a chain reaction).
I have just the greatest respect for Raisa Maximovna. She is a very good woman, wife, mother and grandmother.
Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich, may God protect you, your family and friends from all evil.
Yours sincerely,
Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
My name is Anna and I am 32 years old. I was born in the USSR and remember your speeches on television. When I was little I was puzzled, and it is hardly surprising. I wondered why my parents whom I so loved would turn on the news or reports of meetings and shushed at us children not to interrupt what they were watching.
Then the word ‘coup’ was everywhere and first my grandmother and then my mother stopped liking you. I remember that ever since I was a child I was told everything was Gorbachev’s fault.
It is only now when I switch on your speeches and interviews from those times that I am amazed that you were able to bear all that. How did you have the strength and courage to take those decisions and take responsibility for them, when people at the time could not even understand why it was necessary?
I realize you are unlikely to read my letter, but… I really want to tell you, Mikhail Sergeyevich, that I think you are a wonderful man! And that you were a wonderful president, who really wanted to change people’s lives for the better. I so regret that we have no people like you in our present government, and little prospect that we will have any time soon.
Thank you so much, and do forgive a certain naivety in the way this is written.
Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
To be honest, I never really understood (to put it mildly) what you achieved, although I remember the years 1986–91 as the best in my life. Freedom!
It is only now that I see the significance of what you did! You were born inside the system but made such incredible changes in it, like an outsider. You achieved the impossible. I do not know whether you had a team of like-minded colleagues, but can well imagine how heavy the burden must have been.