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“... I missed meeting Mikhail Gorbachev four years ago, at a centenary conference of the Nobel Peace Foundation in Oslo, which matched a selection of Nobel Peace Prize winners with a selection of academics. I had accepted the invitation because he was going to be there, but he didn’t show up, and my opposite number turned out to be Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, an admirable figure no doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone ...”

“... The Government of Russia has begun the year badly, even ominously. The flailing impotence of Mikhail Gorbachev has been replaced by Boris Yeltsin’s control by stealth. Gorbachev was open about the need for the retention of All-Union institutions: Yeltsin condemned his efforts, helped form the Commonwealth of Independent States – and has since then ensured that Russia controls all of the formerly common mechanisms in its own name ...”

“... The promotion of Mikhail Gorbachev to top job in the Kremlin a little over a year ago has commanded intense interest in the outside world. Two new biographies, one by a West German newspaper correspondent, the other by a Russian émigré, will in their different ways do something to satisfy that interest. But why exactly are we so interested? Common-sense explanations start with the obvious fact of a generational shift in the Kremlin ...”

“... changes since the death of Brezhnev in November 1982 and particularly since the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary in March 1985, it is still far from clear what their result will be. For all the turnover in the leadership, more extensive than at any time since Stalin’s purges of the late Thirties; for all the attack on ...”

“... 15 Republics as one national entity. Alksnis is widely believed to have been the man who pushed Mikhail Gorbachev into his current hardline position when, last year, he gave the Soviet President 30 days to get to grips with the dissolution of the Union. Those whom Alksnis most criticised – Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Foreign Minister; Yegor ...”

“... where the 19th Party Conference of June 1988 had left off. Then followed an uneasy month while Mikhail Gorbachev took his annual vacation. As last year, some members of the leadership took advantage of his absence to make thinly-veiled attacks on current policies, claiming that socialism was being undermined. Pessimistic rumours about his and ...”

“... the injured and irradiated; and Dr Robert Gale, the American surgeon who joined them. You have Mikhail Gorbachev, the charismatic, controversial Soviet leader, castigated for remaining silent from 26 April to 14 May, who nevertheless seized on the Chernobyl accident to add powerful impetus to his campaign of glasnost. You have the Soviet media ...”

“... on Foreign Relations.* The title refers to the assurance on the limits of Nato expansion given to Mikhail Gorbachev by James Baker, then US secretary of state, in 1990. The Soviet Union had stationed troops in East Germany since the liberation of Berlin; in 1990 they numbered 380,000. Gorbachev was in a strong position ...”

“... on the basis of an industrial machine that was already in place. As we all now know, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev who has told us so time and again in order to justify his extraordinary policies, it ran out of steam in the latter part of Leonid Brezhnev’s long reign – a period of economic contentment for the Soviet people. Reformers clustering ...”

“... many who believe that the last chance has gone, who no longer have any faith in perestroika, or in Mikhail Gorbachev, or indeed in the continuing existence of the Soviet Union. A great number of those who, for the past five and a half years, have been Gorbachev’s closest supporters are turning away from him. Some are ...”

“... past the windows. I had not been in the Soviet Union for a few years – not since the advent of Gorbachev and perestroika. Behind lay Poland in crazy convulsions of freedom and inflation, where a return first-class ticket to Vilnius with sleeper cost less than a double espresso in the Holiday Inn. There was a crowd round the iron stove at the end of the ...”

“... entirely sympathetic and told me that everything was about to change because a new broom called Mikhail Gorbachev was on the way up. Some time later I saw the journalist’s name on a long list of alleged Russian spies expelled by the government. I Googled him the other day. He’s now a banker. I can only remember one contact with a Russian ...”

“... transferred to that of the élite Moscow State University. Another lad from a country village, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been in the same faculty before him, but Gorbachev had been the son of a model Communist, not of a suspect Chechen. An acquaintance of mine who knew Khasbulatov when he was a scholar said he was the ...”

“... relations which included the deployment of Cruise and Pershing II in Western Europe. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. It was apparent that he meant to do something about the ‘stagnation’ of his country, economically and politically. But it was not at all clear that this would mean any fundamental change in the ...”

“... Of the various words which Gorbachev has used to describe his reforms, there can be no doubt which has had the most impact. Though perestroika (‘reconstruction’) conveys the intended transformation of the system, it is a vague concept to which all subscribe in theory but whose practical implications few understand ...”