I interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev in 1998, seven years after his fall from the presidency of the Soviet Union – for a 24-part series commissioned by Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, and directed by Jeremy Isaacs, the first chief executive of Channel 4. It was an ambitious attempt to map the beginning, long middle and swift end of a global stand-off which had defined, for the first time, the world into two hostile blocs. Each had its master – the Soviet Union leading for communism, the US for democracy – each had its long tail of allies, each fished among the neutrals in mainly “developing” countries, each had leaders who inherited the great enmity, some with reluctance, others with relish.
By 1998, Gorbachev was, as many had found, not an easy subject to interview: because my Russian had decayed a bit since I had ended a four-year tour as the FT’s Moscow bureau chief more than two years earlier, I struggled to interrupt the flows. He was known to be garrulous, and his answers were rarely compact, nor did they stick to the subject posed by the question. He was most animated when asked to talk of Ronald Reagan, whose US presidency ran from 1981 to 1989 and who was credited with ending the Cold War in partnership with Gorbachev (general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union then its president, from 1985-91). I had expected some warmth from the Russian to the American. But instead he shook his head and said how tedious the latter was, how he kept bringing out a Russian proverb he had been taught – “doveryai, no proveryai”: “trust, but verify”, repeating it each time they met. “It was terrible, terrible, to have to agree and smile to this,” he said.
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