From the first joke of the Nobel Peace Prize Mikhail Gorbachev, as soon as we entered the Ariston Roof for the conference, the day after his participation in the third evening of the Festival conducted by Fabio Fazio, we immediately realized that everything would be very informal. In the brief stop in the "photocall" area, the former President of the USSR greeted the almost one hundred photographers with a joke "When you continue with all these flashes it seems that you are shooting with Kalashnikovs".
Addressing the audience of journalists, crowded as never before, he added: "There are so many of you and I wonder what they will want to ask me" (for the occasion, several dozen correspondents from the Foreign pages added of major newspapers). After responding to Rai's initial greeting, brought by the historic Head of the Press Office, Bepi Nava, Gorbachev went on to comment on the evening of the festival. He underlined that he was very pleased that during the evening he also sang the common people and defined the piece from the pop opera "Notre Dame de Paris", proposed by Riccardo Cocciante, was impressive (which returned to the Festival this year).
Speaking of his presence on stage, together with his wife Raissa, Gorbachev immediately stressed that he had ultimately talked about his passion, politics, despite having taken part in a song festival. “This – he specified – is an allusion to direct your questions”. Speaking of Sanremo, which he had not yet had the opportunity to visit, he said he had found a very green city, with an inviting sea "in which it is perhaps possible to swim now, even if no one has been able to tell me the temperature waterfall. One person answered me: we're not Germans, why should we take a bath now? It's just that you Italians - he commented - are spoiled by the sun and the heat".
We then moved on to the questions (it was agreed that the meeting should last 45-50 minutes). The first of these concerned the lunge on the politicians of the night before, "who work - he said on stage - just to get elected". “I didn't want to dismiss the politicians, but I put the accent – he clarified – on a wider problem. Politics, and also journalists, pay more attention to congresses, to line discussions. We need to find a way for people to decide their own destiny. We create opportunities for greater participation of people to politics. Let me play on words: there is a need for the democratization of democracy".
And to stay at the Festival he was asked about his relationship with music. “It's a passion passed on from my mother, but I sing better when I drink a little. I am very attached to the Soviet lyric, to the patriotic songs of the war for having lived through it. I prefer Russian and Ukrainian romances and Moldovan songs because of their delicacy. I don't like noise, especially when it makes you lose musicality and words. This however, it does not mean the rejection of modern music".
So back to politics. He was asked if he had any regrets: “There are so many things I wanted to do and didn't do. I have no regrets. I was able to make – added Gorbachev – many reforms. As you know, there is no such thing as a happy reformer. I am saddened not to have been able to see a modern USSR and see the peoples who understood it experience a perestroika accomplished. One of the most widespread regrets among people is that – she added – of not having found a person with whom to share life. I, on the other hand, am lucky with my wife and I am happy".
Sadly, Raissa Gorbaciova would die seven months later. Thirty-five minutes of the press conference had already passed and the sixth question was reached: "Where did communism go wrong, where did the communists go wrong and where are those who govern today on both sides going wrong?". With the Head of the Rai Press Office we looked at each other worried about the little time still available. But the former President of the USSR, after thanking his colleague for the question, in just over seven minutes (including the translation) gave a lesson in contemporary history. Quoting a book of his that he had just published, entitled "About the past and the future", he claimed to have asked himself the same question of why that socialist model of communism of the USSR had been defeated.
“Paradoxically – declared Gorbachev – the first answer had been given by Lenin himself, just four years after the revolution, when he wrote that they had made a mistake, not having considered the problem of how to combine the self-interest of the individual with the socialist construction of a society. And he came to the conclusion that a way had to be found to reconcile these two principles. This - added the former President of the USSR - went down in history as the New Economic Theory. Lenin then died and the subsequent power struggle resulted Stalin, a sick boss. And we became a totalitarian state with all that goes with it, with the victims and the control of human minds. But totalitarian regimes, even when they solve internal problems, cannot survive. The totalitarian economy faced with the challenges of technical and scientific progress did not stand up to the challenge and was defeated. The collapse of the USSR - he continued - was seen as the victory of Western liberalism in the Cold War. It was propaganda! The problem of the present moment is not the victory of one ideology over another. We are all looking for answers to important questions. And I wonder what can be expected from a situation where 20% of the developed world draws on 80% of global resources? And for this reason I took the liberty, yesterday from the stage of the Ariston Theater, to affirm that I agree with John Paul II who hopes for a completely different world”.
Politics and international relations had now taken the upper hand and the press conference could continue, despite the commitments of the Nobel Prize winner. The next questions concerned the future and prospects for Russia of that time; the harsh reactions of Rifondazione Comunista to the presence of the former General Secretary of the CPSU at the Festival; relations with the then President of the Council of Ministers, Massimo D'Alema; the appeal promoted by the Liberation Unit of the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, Abdullah Ocalan; the rumored NATO intervention in Kosovo. And there was also talk of the attempted coup in the Soviet Union three years earlier, in August 1991.
While Gorbachev and his family were in Crimea, part of his government and his closest associates attempted a putsch to take control of the nation. The former President of the USSR took the opportunity to tell the journalists present at the Ariston Roof about when, in the days immediately following the attempted coup, the then President of the Council of Ministers, Giulio Andreotti, returning to Italy from visit to China, decided to reverse course to meet him in Moscow.
“It was just us with our respective wives and no one else was there, when Signora Andreotti – Gorbachev recounted – asked my wife how it was possible not to see the traitor nearby. And Raissa replied: I understand that both you and her husband are believers and so I ask you how did Christ not see Judas at her side?". In a previous question regarding his subsequent political defeat, Gorbachev had underlined that he still considered it a victory "because he - he stated - I have not deviated from democracy, I have not allowed civil war and the triumph of violence".
After twelve questions (fifteen others could not be answered due to lack of time) and after more than an hour and a half, compared to the agreed forty-five minutes, a meeting ended which would have had nothing to do with a demonstration if it had been made up of “just songs”. Because Sanremo is Sanremo.
