The tragic three of Russia

Diane Francis editor of the Canadian National Post, Senior Researcher atlantic Council Diane Francis: Gorbachev supported the illegal annexation of Crimea Putin in 2014 (Photo: Reuters) I first met Putin in 1990, then Yeltsin in 1992 and Gorbachev. The death of Mikhail Gorbachev marked the death of a significant figure of the 20th century, which raised the iron curtain and began negotiations on weapons control with President Ronald Reagan to reduce the risk of nuclear catastrophe.

Video of the day in the west is praised, and in Russia they were clogged for the chaos that led to the collapse of the Empire of the Soviet Union and the current dictatorship. The reports point out that the cause of death was renal failure, but his heart was apparently broken. He was half a Ukrainian, many of his relatives died during the famine organized by Stalin, who destroyed millions of Ukrainians, and he witnessed Russia's war against Ukraine, saying that it would never be.

I interviewed Gorbachev and met with his successors Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin during separate meetings, which were largely revealing and can help explain why Russia's history was and remains so terrible. In 1985, Gorbachev became the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which included 15 countries. Plus there were six satellites of the Eastern Bloc (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany).

He has taken steps to put an end to the Cold War through weapons control agreements, as well as to restructure the Russian economy and give freedom to deploy a decade of catastrophic Stalinism. But his policy did not work and caused chaos, differences within the empire and the struggle for power with Yeltsin, which he eventually lost.

Until 1989, four years after he came to power, peaceful movements for independence began to first cover the countries of the Eastern Bloc, the culmination of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He did not send Soviet troops there, and everywhere was proclaimed independence, as it happened in many Soviet republics, the most visible - in Ukraine. In August 1991, Gorbachev was arrested by supporters of a rigid line as part of an attempt by a coup, but after a few days he was released.

After all, on December 24, 1991, he resigned, and on December 25, 1991, the USSR was officially dissolved. Yeltsin became the President of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin's board from 1991 to 1999 was also turbulent. Corruption raged, and the economy shakes when it and its associates shared the wealth of the country and corporations.

He also - at the request of his anointing and former spy Vladimir Putin - gave the KGB wide powers, which, after all, allowed Putin to establish the absolute dictatorship that exists today. For many years, Gorbachev has despised Yeltsin and his popularity, noting that "he was drinking like a seamstress . . . he says vaguely, the devil knows what he invented, he is like a traveling plate. " In 2000, Putin accepted Russia from Yeltsin and began to rule with an iron hand.

He also returned stability and restored the economy due to the sharp increase in oil prices, gas and raw materials. But he considered the collapse of the Soviet Union a tragedy that should be turned back, and accused Gorbachev that the West by deception forced him to believe that NATO would not expand to the east. In an interview with NBC, he said in recent years: "They have fooled the fool on four cams," quoted the phrase from the Russian children's song.

I first met Putin in 1990, then Yeltsin in 1992 and Gorbachev in 1993. In the spring of 1990, I was at a party where politicians and a military leadership was attended by NATO near Bonn, then the capital of Western Germany. Putin spent five years like a KGB spy in Eastern Germany, and he was present at the meeting, introducing himself to a writer who works in the East German newspaper in Dresden.

His main task was to collect NATO information for the Kremlin, a task in which he clearly thrived, given that he was able to be inserted into a lot of doors and communicate at this and other parties that were attended by politicians and high -ranking officials from America, Canada, Canada, Canada, Great Britain and the rest of Europe. We chatted about half an hour. He gave me a business card.

Years after he became president of Russia, one West German journalist told me that Putin was a guy I was talking to at that party. He clearly used a fictional name I do not remember, but I remember he was friendly, spoke perfectly in English and German and asked many questions about military and political affairs before disappearing in the crowd.

This story demonstrated his lifelong obsession, talent for deception and extraordinary cunning, the ability to penetrate the holidays of the holy "enemy" at the highest level to spy or find contacts. In the same year, he left KGB and Germany. In 1996, he joined the administration of Yeltsin, in 1999 he joined the Prime Minister, and in 2000 he became president of Russia. In February 1992, I met with Yeltsin in Moscow, when the Soviet Union and Russia broke up.

My newspapers, The Financial Post and Sun Media, sent me and the photographer to the former USSR for a few weeks to lead the chronicle of what happened there as it declined. Initially, we went to Ukraine, which overwhelmingly voted for exit from the USSR, then spent weeks in Russia. All and everything around was in chaos and sold. I contact a questionable Canadian businessman who easily achieved an interview with Yeltsin for me.

He offered a morning meeting because, as he explained, Yeltsin was usually drunk by the end of the day. I came at 9 am, waited, and I was taken to a room with a drunken leader in a country who said something, but quite indistinguishable. I went without a conversation. Gorbachev was right about Yeltsin, and the country now found herself in the hands of a populist and an alcoholic.

Looking back, you can guess that, apparently, the backstage was also managed by Putin, a former spy with secret plans, which he kept and still holds with him. In April 1993, I was offered an interview with Gorbachev in Alberta, where he received the honorary degree of the University of Calgary. I found him charming, warm and sociable.

In a public speech, said before our interview, he criticized Yeltsin and said that "it seems, he did not understand the seriousness of his policy of shock therapy", and also said that he was proud of "bringing his freedom to my country and thus changed what How our people live.

" Later, I asked him as a communist and an experience with experience, whether he had an insight that led him to the desire to change his country so radically? He answered yes, and it was a trip to the farm to Alberta in the early 1980s, when he was responsible for Russia's agriculture. He said it changed the course of his thinking . . . and history. "My friend was an ambassador to Canada and said," You have to come here "to see what the opportunities can be.

The United States is a superpower and our enemy, but Canada is a different way, the third way, ”he said. - I spent three days on a farm that belonged to my father, two of his adults and their families. I liked them. They worked well, were good people, good farmers, paid taxes, cared for their neighbors, sacrificed for charity and, most importantly, could produce more products than a cooperative farm in Russia with a thousand people.

It was then that I realized that our system is unacceptable and something needs to be changed. ” Obviously, all three Russian leaders were imperfect because Russia was also imperfect. When Gorbachev and Yeltsin left their position, both were unpopular at home, but Gorbachev became a hero for some, though not for everyone, in the West. "He was the most beloved Russian in Germany," Deutsche Welle (DW) wrote after his death.

However, Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvidas Anushauskas stated that Gorbachev was a criminal who ordered the brutal suppression of peaceful protests in Vilnius, Tbilisi, Almaty, Baku and other cities. There was no repentance . . . The only plus is that he signed the surrender of the Soviet Union. "Gorbachev supported the illegal annexation of Crimea Putin in 2014 and opposed Ukraine's membership in NATO, saying the media:" War between Russia and Ukraine? This is an absurdity.

" This year, he kept silence of the uncontrolled Putin's invasion of February 24 and genocide - a mistake that throws a shadow on his inheritance. that comes from traditional Russian practice to harness three horses in a row to pull heavy sleighs in the snow. Unfortunately, the Russian three since 1985 consisted of a dreamer, a drunkard and a two -faced agent of special services.