ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev today is a dour and humorless man. His hopes were dashed in the 1980s, when he became the reformist Russian president only to suffer the seemingly eternal hatred of the Russian people. Mikhail Gorbachev’s role in the world was clearly displayed at this meeting of international journalists, thinkers and politicians sponsored by his think tank, the World Political Forum. Gorbachev blames the United States for the financial collapse in the world and how it is related to environmental destruction. Gorbachev still thinks that glasnost and perestroika can be applied internationally; it is not clear exactly how. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, question at the conference was whether the Western world could collapse as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Soviet Union did during Gorbachev’s 1980s—first in a rush as Eastern Europeans fled to the West and finally with formal declaration of collapse in December, 1991. It is a crisis of all systems and of the very model of democracy.
