It's immediately apparent that he is in poor health. He is overweight, his face is puffy and, as he says, he has spent the last one-and-a-half years "almost entirely in the hospital." He has had four operations in five years and suffers from severe diabetes. He was even erroneously reported dead on Twitter last May. All of this has left its mark on him. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, who turns 82 on Saturday, has spent these last five years working on a new book. The original Russian title translates as "Alone With Myself," a melancholy title that describes his mood more accurately than the title of the German translation, "All in Good Time," to be released in March.
Are we interested in reading yet another book penned by the first and last president of the Soviet Union? By someone who left the political stage 21 years ago? Gorbachev has already written five books. The first, published in 1989, was about perestroika, the rebuilding of Soviet society. Then he wrote one about German reunification and, in 1995, a book simply entitled "Memoirs." Hasn't everything been said by, and about, Mikhail Gorbachev? Don't we know enough of his truths by now?
Not quite. "Alone With Myself," published in Russia last fall, is the most personal book to date by the tragically failed reformer. He dedicated it to his wife, Raisa Maximovna, who died in September 1999. Gorbachev suggests that it wasn't her leukemia that killed her, but his perestroika, and her grief and profound mortification regarding how the Gorbachevs were treated in Russia after 1991.
"Fate was generous to me. It gave me a rare chance," writes the former Kremlin leader. But he also rails against his own fate, two decades after his forced departure from office.
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