Gorbachev Discusses Cold War at Lafayette

Mikhail Gorbachev's lecture Wednesday night at began with a "This is Your Life," kind of moment.

Before he began to speak, the school presented a short collection of video clips showing at the height of his power.

Watching that video, Gorbachev, 80, told an audience that filled the college's Kirby Sports Center, took him back to a time when America and the Soviet Union chose to "step aside from the abyss and lead the world from the abyss."

He was talking about the threat of nuclear war, and the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and 1990s.

"We had been close to the possibility of the nuclear danger becoming a reality," Gorbachev said, speaking through an interpreter.

"Let me mention that at the hgt of the Cold War, for six years…the Soviet leaders and American leaders had not had a single summit. To me, that still sounds amazing," Gorbachev said.

Moving away from that reality was a difficult process, he said, recalling his first meeting with Ronald Reagan in Geneva.

Reagan had a reputation as a hawk, Gorbachev said, and their first meeting did little to change that impression. He remembered telling his staff: "Reagan is indeed a conservative. I would say more, he is a dinosaur."

For his part, Reagan would be quoted calling Gorbachev a "diehard Bolsheveik."

Yet after three days of talks, "we made enormous progress," Gorbachev said. "And we started to build initial trust. It was on the night of the last day of the summit that the final document was produced. It stated nuclear war could not be won and should not be fought."

Gorbachev said that one of the results of those talks was the end of the idea that a single country would seek military superiority over others.

"It seems that perhaps that things aren’t beginning to change in this regard," he said. "We see that our American friends are excessively concerned about their security and trust no one. This is not a good thing."

But Gorbachev, who won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, said he's hopeful about the future of both nations.

Russia, he said, has stumbled in the 20 years since the end of the Soviet Union. The "shock therapy" of Boris Yeltsin's economic reforms "ruined the economy" in Russia, and Gorbachev said the country is on its way -- "more than halfway" -- to becoming a democracy.

And Gorbachev said he sees America changing and looking inward in a way it wasn't "six or seven years ago."

He said it's troubling how much the economy here relies on "the military industrial" sector.

"I’m not saying these things to rankle anyone," Gorbachev said. "By the way, I’m saying these things to my people at home. A lot of brain power is concentrated in that sector. I believe that brainpower should move away from that sector to other goals."

Gorbachev's talk coincided with the opening of Lafayette's Oechsle Center for Global Education, and its new major in international affairs, said college president Daniel Weiss.

It's fitting then, Weiss said, that the school hosted Gorbachev, "one of the very few individuals who have played a pivotal role in shaping the world in a positive way since the end of the second world war."

Before Gorbachev's talk, reporters had a chance to speak with Llynea Drack, who credits Gorbachev's reforms for allowing her to meet her husband; when the Soviet Union allowed its students to study abroad, Drack took advantage of the program and wound up living in the United States.

Lafayette, meanwhile, was one of the first six colleges in the country to be part of the U.S.-Soviet exchange program.