A Gorbachev Epiphany?

Abstract

The confident words were those of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was speaking in Moscow in June 1988 to a gathering of journalists and assessing his just-concluded summit meeting with American President Ronald Reagan. Only five months before, the two leaders had signed a treaty on intermediate range nuclear forces, an important benchmark in the history of US-Soviet relations, one that appeared at the time to have closed off what some had called ‘Cold War Two’ — the period of tense confrontation between the superpowers in the early eighties — and opened up a new period of understanding, not the Detente of the Nixon-Kissinger period, but perhaps ‘Detente Two’.

Somebody asked the American President whether he still considered the Soviet Union to be an ‘evil empire.’ He said no, and he said that within the walls of the Kremlin, next to the Tsar cannon, right in the heart of the ‘evil empire.’ We take note of that. As the ancient Greeks say, ‘everything flows, everything changes. Everything is in a state of flux.’