The Trump-Putin Alaska Summit brings to mind one of the most memorable interviews of my life, and the back story is good, too.
At the turn of the century, it was popular, especially in the white collar world, to take part in a new tradition called “Take Your Children to Work Day.” By bizarre coincidence, this day in 2000 coincided with an interview I had managed to schedule with former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who was in New York on behalf of a global environmental organization.
Gorbachev was accompanied by the same interpreter who appeared in all the photos of him with Reagan. I was accompanied by Steve Shabad of Newsweek, who spoke Russian and had recently translated foe me a commendation my maternal great-grandfather, Alexander Kagen, a multilingual Jew from Grudno, had received from the Czar for his help on the 1890 census.
The rest of my entourage consisted of Charlotte Alter, age 11, Tommy Alter, age 9, and Molly Alter, age 6, who were all quiet and well-behaved. The photo we have of them with Gorbachev is often mistaken for one taken at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.
Excerpts from the interview are somewhere in the Newsweek archive, which is not easily accessible online because Newsweek’s owners have been too cheap to properly digitize old issues.
Gorbachev was a lot more gray than I remembered from seeing him in the flesh at the 1987 Washington Summit and the purple birthmark on his bald head more striking. But what was truly memorable was his answer to one question:
I asked him why he had not just rolled the Red Army into East Germany or other parts of Eastern Europe as Khrushchev had done in Budapest in 1956 and Brezhnev in Prague in 1968. There had been some skirmishing but the Soviets quickly put down the revolts. If Gorbachev had done something similar in the 1980s it would have made him more popular at home
His answer is what made him one of the great men of the 20th Century, far more central to the demise of communism than, say, Ronald Reagan:
“To what end?” he asked. I told him I didn’t understand. So he said it again: “To what end?” He then went on to explain that invading another country would do nothing to better the lives of his own people.
Contrast that to Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine not only hasn’t bettered the lives of the Russian people, it has led to the deaths of 250,000 of them.
It’s hard to predict what’s next for Ukraine. Even if Trump sells out to Putin, like Chamberlain to Hitler at Munich, the Ukrainians will fight on.
two things we know for sure. Might should not make right. And the character of the Russian leader makes all the difference, as I and my children learned that day a quarter century ago.
