Russia in Global Affairs

Perestroika inherited a difficult situation in terms of interethnic and federal relations. I have to admit that when we started perestroika, my colleagues and I did not see the full extent of that problem.

More than three and a half decades have passed since the start of the process of change in the Soviet Union known throughout the world as perestroika. I have been trying to find answers to the questions put to me by scholars, journalists and ordinary people in the letters that I receive. It has not been relegated to the past. The experience and the lessons of perestroika remain relevant today.

Now that relations between Russia and the West are incomparably worse than they were when the Cold War ended in 1989, it is more important than ever to pay attention to what was called the New Thinking.