Bureau recommends: Documents reveal last days of Soviet state
The desperate last attempts of Mikhail Gorbachev to hold on to power have been laid bare in a cache of previously unknown documents, Der Spiegel has revealed.
The papers include minutes from negotiations with foreign leaders, handwritten recommendations from Gorbachev’s advisers, confidential notes by ambassadors and shorthand records of debates in the politburo.
The some 10,000 documents from his almost six years in office shed light on the final days of the Soviet Experiment.
According to Der Spiegel: “Reading the documents feels like stepping back in time. All at once, they reveal the many problems of the calcified system, where farmers and miners alike were rebelling and intellectuals were demanding democratic elections.
‘The people of the Baltic states, the Georgians and the Moldovans were revolting against the Russians, while the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine — the Soviet Union foreign policy that countries could not leave the Warsaw Pact — was looming in Eastern Europe.’
Gorbachev has presented himself as a determined reformer of the decaying Soviet state.
But according to Der Spiegel, the papers, which had been gathering dust in Moscow, show he was often driven to react to the inexorable turning of events.
‘In other words, the Kremlin leader did what many retired statesmen do: He later significantly embellished his image as an honest reformer.’
