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Dinner with Gorby

Posted By Peter Tesch | | 22 April, 2020 | Gorbachev, Soviet Union, Moscow

23 September 2017, MoscowAt short notice, a spontaneous invitation to join close mutual friends for an intimate (six people) dinner with Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev at a well-known restaurant near his country home outside Moscow.  "Gorby" ... first and last President of the USSR, last Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; one of the 21st Century's monumental fi...

Comments On “Dinner with Gorby”

  1. Rakesh Ahuja

    Tovarich Peter. Just read your descriptive comment. I should have been alerted to your writing. So, so agree with your view.

  2. Peter Tesch

    Sorry it has taken me so long to return to "DMM" ...Indeed, too few people understand that the man who brought down the Soviet Union was not Gorbachev - as most are educated nowadays to believe and condemn - but, rather, Yeltsin. That is not to Yeltsin's discredit, of course, but Gorbachev merits better press than he is given in his own country. He and Shevardnadze, whom I was fortunate also to meet after his resignation as Soviet foreign minister, and whose elegant and stylish grand-daughter I came to know somewhat in more recent times, faced choices: they took a path which delivered the world from potential cataclysm, even if they were not cognisant of the forces they were unleashing within their own brittle empire. Compared to them, and to Reagan and G H W Bush, those who bestride our contemporary world's stage are stunted narcissists.

  4. Come Carpentier de Gourdon

    I met Gorbachev once in Switzerland. He looked surprisingly soft and even vulnerable for a man of his stature. I understood how he had been upstaged and outplayed by the Politburo and by Yeltsin Raisa was his pillar of strength. He was also betrayed by the British and the Americans who exploited his weakness.