Lion in Winter Mikhail Gorbachev’s new memoir

Still a maverick at 82, Mikhail Gorbachev talks about Putin’s Russia, his own legacy, and Raisa—the wife he loved and lost.
What hair is left has turned white. The face is fuller, and the famous birthmark has retreated. Now that he’s 82, age has finally caught up to Mikhail Gorbachev—no longer the Young Turk whose reformist zeal was so alien to the fusty officials of the Soviet state that he and his supporters were branded “Martians.”
“It’s simply a mess,” he says, sighing. “In the last five years I’ve had four operations. Major operations. It’s why we’re here now. I’ve come to speak openly and honestly. There’s no point beating about the bush, especially in my situation.”
Time has become his most precious commodity. Indeed, amid his medical difficulties, a rumor surged through the Twittersphere last May that he had died. Gorbachev was required to issue a statement insisting, like Mark Twain before him, that “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
I had followed his health problems closely, as we have known each other for more than a decade. We were introduced by my father, with whom Gorbachev co-owns the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta (I own the Independent and Evening Standard newspapers in the U.K., and I serve as the chairman of the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation). Gorbachev knew I had always been keen for an interview.
For our meeting—at his namesake foundation offices in Moscow—he’s dressed unfussily: tieless, his charcoal business suit paired with a maroon-striped shirt. He is talking breezily with his aides when I arrive; seeing me, he rushes over to throw an arm around my shoulder. Gorbachev has always been a great hugger; it is one of the many things that make people warm to him.
On the way to his study, we pass memorabilia—photographs of him with almost every political titan from the last 30 years, and awards, among them the Nobel Peace Prize. Directly behind his leather-covered desk, one portrait has pride of place: It is of Raisa, his wife, whom he lost to leukemia more than thirteen years ago. As he gazes up at it, years seem to melt away from the elder statesman’s face.
He and Raisa met as students at Moscow University. “One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening,” Gorbachev says, and his mouth forms a childlike smile. “And we walked like that for our whole life.” It must be painful not to have her with him, I say.
He descends into silence. Memories of Raisa are fresh in his mind, as he has recently published a memoir in Russia, Alone with Myself, which includes a remarkable account of his 46-year romance with his late wife. Former general secretaries have never before written about such intimate matters.
But then Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev’s very public marriage was unprecedented. When her husband attended summits, there was glamorous Raisa by his side. She enjoyed the cut-and-thrust of political debate and would often point out to foreign visitors that as a university professor, she had greater academic credentials than her husband. Mikhail called her “my general” and claimed he discussed every decision with her. She always denied such influence, insisting she offered only spousal support.
“We’d come back from Australia,” he says, thinking of 1999, the year of Raisa’s death. “It was a great trip, an interesting one. Within a month she was feeling ill, and on September 20 she died. It turned out to be a very serious form of cancer, which still cannot be treated.”
He pulls the Alone with Myself manuscript from a drawer, wanting to read me a passage about Raisa’s last moments, how he and his daughter, Irina, stood by Raisa’s bed. Gorbachev beseeched her not to leave him—life could have no meaning for him if she did. It concludes, “I had never felt so lonely.”
Gorbachev admits that what he still finds the most hard to take is the feeling that he could have done more to help. The memory burdens him. “Life is always changing,” he finally says.