5/3/05 -- Mikhail Gorbachev, the poor boy from rural Russia who rose to become the leader of one of the world’s great superpowers, then had the courage to steer it from totalitarianism toward democracy, says his career would not have been possible without an education.
“That is why it is so important for education to be accessible -- accessible to all,” the former Soviet president said in a speech at the opening General Session at the Annual Conference.
Gorbachev reached out to former enemies, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, and continues to work for peace and economic development around the world.
The world today is moving at a dizzying pace, with changes that once took hundreds of years occurring in the space of a few generations, Gorbachev says. Globalization is making us all interconnected. Technology is booming.
At the same time, the gap between the world’s rich and poor is widening. Half the world’s population -- and two-thirds of Russia’s -- lives in poverty, he says.
“The world is going through what I call, ‘a time of trouble,’” Gorbachev says. Such challenges, and the continuing threats of terrorism and environmental destruction, require a new type of visionary leader.
What is needed, he says, is “a transformational leader” who has “a special kind of vision.”
In the 1980s, the world was presented with two such leaders who would become unlikely partners in the quest for world peace. Someone asked Gorbachev shortly after his first encounter with President Reagan what he thought of the actor turned president. “I said that Ronald Reagan was a real dinosaur,” Gorbachev recalled.
And Reagan called Gorbachev “a diehard Bolshevik.”
“Needless to say, the dinosaur and the diehard Bolshevik just needed two days” to make a momentous declaration “that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” Gorbachev says. “I believe that statement is as important today and tomorrow as it was yesterday.”
Gorbachev briefly recounted some key events in his life: his childhood under Nazi occupation; his graduation from Moscow State University in 1950; and his senior essay on the merits of Joseph Stalin, who was still revered for beating the Germans.
Later, Gorbachev and other Russians of his generation would come to know the true horrors of Stalin’s regime, and that knowledge would come to inform Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, or openness, which radically transformed Soviet society and paved the way for democratic reforms.
Perestroika is just as necessary today as it was 20 years ago, when he introduced it, Gorbachev says. And tellingly, it is among the well-educated young Russians of today that it is most fervently supported, which he calls a testament to the power of education to lift the spirit and expand the mind.
Gorbachev also says he is concerned about a lack of progress toward political freedom throughout the world.
“We see today a slowdown of the democratic process, and sometimes a rollback of the democratic wave, and this should be of concern to everyone,” Gorbachev says.