“Mikhail Gorbachev will go down in history as the man who tried to turn a dictatorship into a democracy”, reacts on Tuesday August 30 on franceinfo Jacques Attali, former special adviser to François Mitterrand, after the death of the last leader of the USSR. He keeps Mikhail Gorbachev “the memory of a man truly free from the old system”. “We did not do what was necessary to help him stabilize a regime he wanted to be democratic. We know the rest”explains Jacques Attali.
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franceinfo: What memories do you have of Mikhail Gorbachev?
Jacques Attali: I had the privilege of knowing him very quickly since I met him with François Mitterrand, when he was Minister of Agriculture and where he openly criticized the Soviet system. I kept the memory of a man who was really free with regard to the old system. After he took power, there was an incredible moment during the first meeting with Mitterrand when it was thought that he was going to read a note like all his predecessors. He did pull out a piece of paper, but he took notes.
“It was a real moment of historical change when we saw a Soviet leader being free with regard to everything that could impose a line on him.”
Jacques Attali, former special adviser to François Mitterrandat franceinfo
He had really chosen a path that he had matured, which was to maintain the system of collective property and the Soviet Union but to install a democratic system, to gradually eliminate fear and no longer to shoot at the crowd. . From the moment this was done, of course, the system could only collapse. It took three years for it to collapse.
What relationship did he have with François Mitterrand?
It was a very complicit relationship, very friendly and at the same time very worried because he spent his time saying: “Help me, otherwise there will be a coup against me”. This is also why there was a coup against him which he managed to get out of but which was only a way of delaying his departure. What he failed to see was that his choice of a democracy would call into question the very existence of the Soviet Union. He thought that homo sovieticus existed and that the different provinces, the Ukraine in particular, would never ever become independent.
How do you explain his international aura and his unpopularity in Russia?
Few people have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize as much as he, because he really did everything for it. The fall of the Berlin Wall is nothing. It was he who made it. From the moment when in August 1989 he ordered Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Németh to open the border between Hungary and Austria, all East Germans could cross into West Germany and the fall of the Wall was already a reality. But everyone in the West, especially Americans, thought Gorbachev was just another Soviet.
We have not done at all what was necessary to help him stabilize a regime that he wanted to be democratic. Then we know what happens next. Everything came undone. He was a real democrat and the Americans thought he was a puppet who was going to give way to other dictators. What happened, but because we did not help to achieve democratic transformation.
Will he go down in history?
He will go down in history, certainly hated by those who would have dreamed of maintaining the USSR. He will go down in history as the man who tried to turn a dictatorship into a democracy. It was certainly in any case in the direction of history since obviously, the direction of history is to move towards more freedom for everyone.