ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev supported George Bush's initiative by temporarily refraining from making a detailed assessment of the various points it contained. Gorbachev, managing to remount the tiger, strengthened his image as a skilled tactician and as the prime mover of the irreversible transformation of his country. After the Cable News Network broadcast a joint interview with Gorbachev and Yeltsin on September 6, the blunt, pragmatic American journalists kept asking the two of them to make television appearances together. Gorbachev's foreign colleagues, reassured to find that he not only had survived the putsch but had once again turned a difficult situation to his own personal advantage, joined forces with belated enthusiasm to open a "second front" in his support. The drooping presidential flag also had to be freshly unfurled on the international scene—which was, moreover, where Gorbachev had had his greatest successes.
