Today, November 10, the last secretary general of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev (82), will meet with the German chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss Western–Russian relations.
As Berliners watched 8,000 balloons being released into the night sky [on Saturday] evening, old divisions between east and west symbolically vanish into thin air with them. Yet the run-up to the festivities has already served up plenty of reminders that, 25 years after the fall of the wall that divided the city for three decades, the scars of history are hurting more than ever.
Speaking at a symposium near the Brandenburg Gate [on Friday morning], Mikhail Gorbachev warned that the world was “on the brink of a new cold war” and strongly criticized the west for having sown the seeds of the current crisis by mishandling the fallout from the collapse of the iron curtain.
“Instead of building new mechanisms and institutions of European security and pursuing a major demilitarisation of European politics…the west, and particularly the United States, declared victory in the cold war,” said the man behind the Soviet Union’s glasnost and perestroika reforms.
“Euphoria and triumphalism went to the heads of western leaders. Taking advantage of Russia’s weakening and the lack of a counterweight, they claimed monopoly leadership and domination in the world.”
Previously an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev backed the current Russian president’s stance over Ukraine, urging western leaders to “consider carefully” Putin’s recent remarks at the Valdai forum: “Despite the harshness of his criticism of the west, and of the United States in particular, I see in his speech a desire to find a way to lower tensions and ultimately to build a new basis for partnership.”
Source: Observer, November 9
Eric Koch’s new book, New Beginnings, was launched on September 20. The book is available from 
