Mikhail Gorbachev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. His social reforms known as glasnost ("openness"), combined with economic reforms known as perestroika ("restructuring"), helped liberalize Soviet society in the late 1980s and ultimately contributed to the downfall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gorbachev was interviewed for the COLD WAR series in September 1997. The excerpts below are translated from Russian.

On the end of the Cold War:

I wish I could say [the world is safer], but I can't. On the one hand, I think we have knocked down the walls of the military blocs, gotten rid of the confrontation and deferred the nuclear threat. No matter how difficult the process of nuclear disarmament, this process is going on and hopefully will continue. The situation in the world is very different now, and it has created great opportunities for us to unite -- not to confront each other, but to unite and to move forward together in search of a new world order. What that new world order is, no one knows now: we have to look for it, to test it. But the main lines are obvious, and this is of course a great achievement. The bloc discipline -- the tough discipline -- has disappeared, and all the problems that used to be repressed by this on each side have come to the surface. Europe received the freedom of choice, and they are solving their problems, they are looking for their national identity, looking for their place in the world and in the European policies, and trying to determine their fate. In Europe, much was done in such a way that many long-term mines were laid, and they started to explode later; and as a result of the not quite adequate behavior of Yugoslavia, we had a crisis. And the same happened on post-Soviet territory. And that's how new problems have come to the surface.

But the main thing that happened which prevented the realization of the concept that was implemented in the Paris Charter for Europe -- this is in fact the view of the world -- was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States were the first ones rubbing their hands happily and rejoicing at the absence of their main opponent. But instead of making use of the situation, taking advantage of it and moving onwards to the new world order, everything has stopped: the Charter is thrown away. While I was at the head of the Soviet Union, NATO had two sessions, and we agreed with them that both the NATO and Warsaw treaties had to be transformed from military into political alliances, and we started to reconsider the military doctrine and think about the transition policies. But as soon as the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact stopped existing, it all collapsed.

Moreover, now we've got the expansion of NATO. There are suspicions about who threatens whom, and the average person asks: "Why should NATO be revived?" There are attempts to change the strategy -- to veer toward the military path. This is an attempt to take advantage of the situation at a time when Russia is weakened, when Central and Eastern European states are weakened, and all are busy with reforms -- because NATO wants to fish in murky waters. So the geopolitical struggle has started again: the struggle for resources, for regions of influence. ...

We have to think of how we are going to live in the new, expanding world. We have to look for answers to that. But instead of that, we are pushed into geopolitical games. I'm definitely against it; it means taking steps back.