Please accept my sincere thanks for that time.
I find myself unable to explain to many people how important and meaningful those changes were, but what of it? Time itself will put everything in perspective. That is one of its characteristics.
Yours respectfully,
My name is Vladislav Gorvitz,
I was born and grew up in Ukraine and in 1989 our family was permitted to emigrate from the Soviet Union.
I was 16 years old then, and now already I am 40.
All my life I have wanted desperately to thank Mikhail Gorbachev for everything he did for our family and hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
I just want to send my personal gratitude on behalf of the hundreds of millions of people whose lives he saved, in police prisons and Afghanistan, and for giving us freedom. I never cry, but as I write this letter to dear Mikhail my tears are flowing.
My thanks beyond measure, dear Mikhail Gorbachev. I am enclosing a photo of me with my parents when I was little, so that you can see three of the hundreds of millions whose lives you made better.
Hello, dear Mikhail Sergeyevich.
My name is Ivan, I am 34 years old and an entrepreneur. I want to thank you for your contribution to the development of Russia. I am grateful to you personally for the freedom I enjoy today.
May God grant you good health and all the very best. I wish also that you may see your achievements develop and not be lost with the passage of time. This is something we all really need.
A huge number of dynamic people are very grateful to you for what you did. Thank you! I wish you happiness and peace.
Yours respectfully,
Dear Mr Gorbachev,
I recently read your book Alone With Myself and want, if I may, to share some of my reactions with you. I am 47 years old and was born in Shchelkovo in Moscow Province. I grew up in Armenia, in Yerevan.
During your presidency, I was already sufficiently grown up to understand and reflect on all that was happening. I remember most people were dissatisfied with your policies.
I always had the feeling that we did not have the full picture, so I never laid all the blame on one person, trying to be impartial.
Your book has given me a chance to form a clear understanding of the reasons for what happened, and now I am certain that no one could have prevented that outcome or improved the situation.
Despite all the mistakes made in the past, and those which all of us, including myself, are still making, I greatly appreciate what you were trying to do. Years will pass, but new generations will still be talking about you and often recall you as a man who turned the country to face in the right direction. I believe that is a great achievement.
I also greatly respect the way you remember your wife, Raisa, in the book. She was and remains to this day the only first lady of the state who could openly discuss the country’s problems with wit and insight. Our people never liked that.
I wish you good health and many, many more years of life. God bless you!
I wish particularly to emphasize that you are one of the outstanding personalities of your time and your place in history is assured. Not because you supposedly ‘destroyed the USSR’. That is absurd. You noticed the cracks in the USSR and took steps to put matters right. You raised the priority of the human factor, reformed society for the benefit of people, terminated the international isolation of the USSR, and opened the road to modern civilization. Those who destroyed the USSR were the little nabobs, those with too much love of power and money. If the USSR had been restructured in accordance with your model, it would exist to this day, doing no harm to our population or other nations. Its concentration of energy, the economy and culture would have been preserved.
I wish Your Excellency success, endurance and robust health!
I would like to wish Mikhail Sergeyevich health, fortitude and success, and to say thank you for his hard work in the past and present for the benefit of society, for his concern for freedom and justice in Russia. I hope that some day Russian people will, in spite of everything, cease to be slaves, will open their eyes and pay due respect not to today’s reformers on paper but to a man who genuinely sacrificed his privileges and position for the sake of others, and that instead of all the innumerable monuments to mass murderers will erect one at least to a true human being.
I believe in the sincerity of a man who ruled a country whose people have been destitute and cowed throughout history, and I believe it was that very sincerity that gave the impulse that awakened a sense of national pride and a feeling of inner freedom in many of our country’s citizens.
History cannot be written in the subjunctive. The Soviet Union collapsed for systemic reasons, and we should long ago have faced up to that fact. What Russia has today is a police state with an immature political system and, consequently, a lack of choice. The sense of freedom, pride and mutual respect can never be eradicated. It makes no sense to react to mean-spiritedness. It will come to nothing and die out because it is contemptible. We need to get on with real work. That is the only way to prevail.
With respect and sincerity,
Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
I have for many years been very grateful to you for releasing me from the daily expectation of nuclear war. It was palpably real for me from about the age of 8. You and you alone freed me from that fear, which had become part of my life.
I thank you also for the wonderful books I was able to read when I was young and wonderful literature flooded the minds of everyone in the country.
Thank you for the live broadcast of the proceedings of the First Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR in 1989, which I watched at the same time as revising for my exams.
Yours sincerely,
We would like to address to greatly respected Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev these words of support and gratitude. Yet again we have stumbled upon vile rumours about him on the Internet. We would like Mikhail Sergeyevich to know that, despite the incessant sordid campaign to denigrate him, there are people who love and deify him.
Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich, during our childhood and teenage years you were at the helm of the state. We are extremely grateful to you for the policy of Glasnost (what a splendid word that is!) which gave our country a real chance to become free and prosperous. It is a pity that we have not so far succeeded in making use of the opportunity. Perhaps all is not yet lost.
Good health to you and those close to you, and again, thank you.