After years of rapprochement, the relationship between Russia and the West is more strained now than it has been in the past 25 years. Putin’s motives, his reasons for seeking confrontation with the West, remain for many a mystery. Not for Mikhail Gorbachev. In this new work, Russia’s elder statesman draws on his wealth of knowledge and experience to reveal the development of Putin’s regime and the intentions behind it. He argues that Putin has significantly diminished the achievements of perestroika and is part of an over-centralized system that presents a precarious future for Russia. Faced with this, Gorbachev advocates a radical reform of politics and a new fostering of pluralism and social democracy.
Gorbachev’s insightful analysis moves beyond internal politics to address wider problems in the region, including the Ukraine conflict, as well as the global challenges of poverty and climate change. Above all else, he insists that solutions are to be found by returning to the atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation which was so instrumental in ending the Cold War.
This book represents the summation of Gorbachev’s thinking on the course that Russia has taken since 1991 and stands as a testament to one of the greatest and most influential statesmen of the twentieth century.
Spis treści
Table of contents
To my readers
Preface: Perestroika and the future
Trying to bury me
I After Perestroika
The 1990s: Defending Perestroika
My last day in the Kremlin
A new beginning, without presidential immunity
Shock therapy
The search for a scapegoat, threats
The Gorbachev Foundation: its first reports
December 1991: politics and morality
Salvation in work
Attempts to ?destabilize? me
The ?Trial of the CPSU?
First results of shock therapy
A year after the coup
My stance
The slide towards social catastrophe
On the brink of crisis
Fateful decisions, fateful days
A state of emergency is not the way to stability
Defects of the new Constitution
1994 gets off to a bad start
Economists advise but the government is not listening
Nikita Khrushchev: lessons in courage and lessons from mistakes
The Union could have been saved
The economy: what now?
Meetings in the regions
Chechnya: a war that could have been avoided
1995: 10 years of Perestroika
The intelligentsia
Government and society
The need for an alternative
Breaking through the conspiracy of silence
Letters relating to the 1996 presidential election campaign
Discrediting elections
The final years of the millennium
The Gorbachev Foundation?s ?First Five-Year Plan?
The elections fail to bring stability
The storm breaks in 1998
How to come out of the crisis?
Letters of support
Raisa Gorbacheva
II Whither Russia?
Putin: the beginning
The new president: hopes, problems, fears
What is Glasnost?
The heavy burden of the presidency
My social-democratic choice
Russia needs social democracy
Issues and more issues
The zero years of the 2000s?
The Yukos affair
A party of new bureaucrats
A second presidential term: what for?
A new direction, or more of the same?
Full of contradictions: the first decade of the new millennium
New elections
Democracy in distress
Operation Successor
Ideas and people
Saakashvili?s adventure and the West: my reaction
Ordeal by global crisis
Defending the credo of Perestroika
Disturbing trends
My eightieth birthday
Russian politics in a quandary
A new Era of Stagnation?
The presidential ?reshuffle? and the Duma elections
For fair elections!
Society awakens
A decision to tighten the screws
Some letters of support in recent years
The need for dialogue between the government and society
III Today?s uneasy world
The relevance of New Thinking
Challenges of globalization
The challenge of security
Ban the bomb!
Consequences of NATO expansion
The world after 9/11
Poverty is a political problem
Responding to the environmental challenge
The water crisis
The threat of climate change
We need a new model of development
Meetings in America: George Shultz and Ronald Reagan
Partners should be equal
The role of the United States in the world
?America needs its own Perestroika?
The election of Obama
The future of Europe
Germany
On a solid foundation
Major figures in European politics
Looking East: China
Russia and Japan
A Simmering Region: Egypt and Syria
Russia and Ukraine
History Is Not Fated
Conclusion
Reflections of an optimist
Index
O autorze
Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union, serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 to 1991. Since then, he has maintained an active role in world affairs through the Gorbachev Foundation, a nonprofit think tank which promotes democracy and humanitarian initiatives globally.
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