SUPERPOWER LOST

Yesterday the world, today... what? In the West, we may admire Mikhail Gorbachev as a man who changed history as few others have done; in Russia, he is all but forgotten. Does the man now touting his memoirs deserve the obscurity into which he has fallen? Or is there still a role to play on the world stage for a man who once dominated it like the stars he admires, De Niro and Schwarzenegger?

Mikhail Ivanov was born in 1931, the same year as Mikhail Gorbachev, a man he hates. Mr Ivanov is a retired lathe operator who lives on a $60- a-month pension in a tiny wooden house three hours out of Moscow, in the middle of nowhere. One rainy evening a couple of weeks ago, he was my welcoming host, and he gave me vodka and more vodka, and pickles from an enamel bucket, and various drinks and jams made from his own apples. We sat under a 10ft mural he had painted himself: a Swiss mountain landscape, done with deft, Impressionist strokes. The other decorations were a photograph of a MiG fighter and an enormous cabbage. A radio upstairs was set on a classical music station, and was turned up to full volume, so the sound distorted badly. At one point in the evening Ivanov stopped speaking mid- sentence, stopped smoking, and listened through the distortion: "Maria Callas," he said, "a rare voice."

When I asked him about Mikhail Gorbachev, whom I had met the previous day, he said, "I hate him. That's my answer to all of your questions. I hate him." Ivanov is a lifelong Communist Party member, but not a mad old Stalinist - he speaks as a kind of Christian socialist: with the emphasis on co-operative living, an organic planet, and the need for a Utopian future, in one life or the other. "It will be wonderful," he said - and it was not quite clear where, or when. He showed me his diary from 1991, the year of Gorbachev's fall, the year of the end of the Communist Party and the end of the Soviet Union. The diary's pages were as damp as the room: and tucked into them was a soggy formal portrait of Gorbachev as General Secretary, gazing firmly into a political middle distance he never quite reached. Along the bottom of the picture, Mr Ivanov had neatly written: "This is the man who destroyed the country."

In the West, Gorbachev's reputation is still attached to uncontrolled crowds on Washington walkabouts, to the Nobel Peace Prize, to the end of the Cold War, to breathless newspaper accolades of the 1980s: Man of the Year, Man of the Decade. In the West, public opinion still remembers the shockingly implausible attributes - a kind of intellectual independence, personal charm - with which he emerged from seven years in the Politburo, 40 years in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The West remembers the small matter of changing the world, and this reputation survived Gorbachev's post-putsch walk down an aeroplane's steps in 1991, wearing summer casuals, stains down the front of his sweater, his power draining away. But in modern Russia - where Mafia Jeeps storm through the traffic, headlights ablaze, and where the token guard in front of Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square slouches with his hands in his pockets, as if under orders to do so - it is not like that. Gorbachev is the candidate of disappointment, of destruction. Mr Ivanov's diary speaks for millions. When Gorbachev ran for president this summer, he secured just 0.5 per cent of the vote.

This looks like utter national disregard, and it looks like ingratitude. "I suppose I'm a bit grateful to him," said the first Russian I spoke to in Russia, a rather detached classical pianist in his mid-thirties, who was supplementing a tiny income by driving me around Moscow at amazingly slow speeds. "When Gorbachev came to power, it was like an eruption in our minds. We had lived in silence. Old people now were walking in the street with little radios to their ears. Now - freedom is not a thing that people really need. People need cars, flats, food, and more sex." He was amused by my interest in Gorbachev, in the way that Britons are amused when Malaysians, say, try to draw them into conversations about the achievements of Margaret Thatcher. He recalled last year's comic hit single, in which celebrated Gorbachev cliches ("In the village, cattle mortality rates are up" and so on), were coupled to a woman's moans of sexual delight.

It seems that Gorbymania, if it exists at all in Russia, is most likely to be detected in the mind of Mikhail Gorbachev. Like Lady Thatcher, Gorbachev is contesting national irrelevance by means of autobiography and a political institute formed in his own image. His long, sober, quietly self-justifying Memoirs have just been published in English (Doubleday, pounds 25); his Foundation was formed at the end of 1991 and is called, officially, the International Fund for Socio-Economic and Political Studies. It researches into "Conflict Settlement and Prevention in a Changing Russian Society" (for example), and also gives to charity. The money is mostly Gorbachev's - from his writings, foreign lecture tours, the 1990 Nobel Prize, a cameo in Wim Wenders's Far Away, So Close. Under the terms of a retirement package (arranged at a meeting in which Boris Yeltsin was incapacitated by drink), the Gorbachev Foundation was given occupancy of a vaguely classical sandy- coloured building on Leningradski Prospekt, a few miles north of Red Square (a billboard advertising Revlon hair dye stands between the building and eight lanes of traffic). But as Gorbachev's power has receded his Foundation has been squeezed and squeezed; and, in a development that must cheer Yeltsin's weakened heart, Gorbachev and his staff now have just a few rooms in one corner, where there is no room for everyone to sit down at the same time.

The other occupant of 49 Leningradski Prospekt is a financial college. Teenage students with training shoes and little rucksacks wander the corridors in twos and threes. They walk, chatting, past Gorbachev's office door, acting out their country's indifference. "Vote for him?' said a group of girls, weighed down by make-up, baffled by the question. "What for?" The most generous endorsement I could elicit was one young woman's claim that Gorbachev - whom she had seen in the canteen - was "better- looking than on television".

In a little ante-room behind Gorbachev's secretary, someone was watching pop videos. Two large men were standing about, and I took them to be bodyguards. I was introduced to the interpreter provided for the interview, and I recognised him as the interpreter from Reykjavik, Geneva and Chequers - the man with a moustache and a bald head who had been there with Gorbachev and Reagan, Gorbachev and Thatcher, who had translated any number of snug, historic fireside exchanges about SDI and Sakharov and a New World Order. His name is Pavel Palazhchenko - beyond that he was reluctant to talk about himself, explaining that, like the man who is still his employer, he was soon publishing a book in English, and was loath to damage its impact with any premature revelations.

After some delay, we both walked into Gorbachev's office, where I saw an Encyclopaedia Britannica, and an abundance of clocks: a clock on the wall, a desk clock in the form of a world map, and an ugly modern grandfather, chiming away. The colour scheme was brown and grey. Mikhail Gorbachev walked towards me, said "Welcome", and encouraged me to sit on a brown leather sofa.

I wished Gorbachev a happy wedding anniversary. He and Raisa, then both students at Moscow State University, were married a few miles from here, on 25 September 1953, six months after the death of Stalin.

"Who told you?" he said, a little suspiciously.

I said the date was in his book. "Ah. Ah," he said. "Indeed, it's true. And therefore I'll soon be going home." He looked at one of his clocks, and laughed. "So it was good of you to remind me."

He does not seem uncomfortable in his bizarre, unprecedented role - that of a deposed Russian leader neither dead nor gagged. In the months following his resignation from the presidency on 25 December 1991 (Yeltsin had his name on the office door the following day), Gorbachev suffered deeply, and would fly, according to one report, into terrible, garbled rages. Today, he behaves as if his former power and influence had just nipped out, and would be back any minute - as if his statelessness was some kind of oversight. The election result? He talked about bad luck, a "confluence of events". Better to consider, he said, a recent opinion poll that asked Russians to rate their leaders since Nicholas II: "4.5 per cent gave Gorbachev an excellent mark," Gorbachev said, smiling, looking me in the eye, "15.5 per cent a good mark, 30 per cent gave Gorbachev a satisfactory rating, which makes 50 per cent of the people who believe I did satisfactory or better. Yeltsin had half these marks."

Mikhail Gorbachev was wearing a dark double-breasted suit. He smiled at the end of every sentence. He seemed not to have aged: he looked the same as he did on television 10 years ago. I was sitting to his right, and was therefore just a few feet from his birthmark, which I noticed is slightly raised - embossed. When I later found courage to bring it up with the architect of perestroika, he said, "The birthmark - for many years it was not visible, because I had hair! Ha! For me it was never of any importance. I was never really upset or concerned. I never had any desire to get rid of it. You know, I'll tell you, someone said the birthmark looked like the American continent on the map, and they had all kinds of theories about that, but that's silly. It's really silly. I'm not a person who believes in things like astrology. I really believe and respect human intellect, the human mind and also morality. Moral values are the most important thing to me."

Gorbachev answers questions at some length, and does not encourage interruptions. He tends to arrive, in time, at a little conclusion - "So you can see..." - as if having presented an essay. He is thorough, as if fearful that no one else ever will be. When I asked him about his wedding day exactly 43 years ago, he said: "If you go due East from here, near Preobrazhenkaya Square, a little further ahead there is a bridge crossing the river Yauza, and near that bridge, on the bank of the river, there was a set of buildings in a kind of square. It was called 'Student Township'." Gorbachev lived here as a student. "Once you have crossed the river, there was the Marriage Registration Office. One day Raisa and I were walking there. At that time, we knew what we wanted, it was quite clear to us, for two years we had been the best of friends, and the decision had been made by that time, so I said, let us just drop into that office."

That was it?

"That was it... In the spring of that year we had decided that we would register our marriage. So I went to my native village [Privolnoye, in the southern region of Stavropol], and all the summer I worked on the combine harvester, and I earned some money and I came back to Moscow and we ordered the wedding dress. And for the first time in my life I had a good suit made to order for myself. The fabric was very famous." He paused, and laughed: "It was called 'Shockworker'. It was a famous wool fabric. By the time of the registration, the shop had not made the dress. But at the little event we had later to celebrate the marriage, by that time everything was ready. We didn't have enough money for Raisa's shoes, and so she had to use her friend's shoes. It was the years after the war, and it was a time when we had to live a very modest and humble life. We were poor. And not just us. Most of the country was having to live in a modest way. But we were in good spirits, and that was the most important thing."

On the day after my interview, I followed Gorbachev's directions, and looked for the Marriage Registration Office and the student hostel. The office has been pulled down, and there was nothing to see but grass and weeds. The hostel, however, is still standing, and is now an engineering college. A concierge at the front desk said Gorbachev's dormitory had been number 324. On the third floor, I walked down a long, wide, yellow corridor, and found that room 324 is now a student cafeteria emblazoned with advertisements, where a 20-year-old woman was selling Hershey Bars and Pepsi. She didn't know this was Gorbachev's bedroom; she said she had once thought of reading his books, but had not been able to find any copies.

Gorbachev's final essay at school was "Stalin - Our Combat Glory, Stalin - the Elation of Our Youth"; it was much admired, and became the school's model for the genre. Gorbachev was a member of the youth wing of the Communist Party at the age of 14, a full member by 1952, and a student of law when to be a student meant - in his words - "massive ideological brainwashing".

"On the day of Stalin's death," Gorbachev told me, "I spent several hours among people who were moving towards the centre of the city to see Stalin's body lying in state. That was the only time I saw Stalin - lying in state, dead. There was a kind of mixture in what I saw - greatness, and something, something... I had a feeling there was something alien in him. But certainly all of us were shocked by his death and regarded it as a tragedy. We did not know anything about his crimes; we fully believed in Stalin."

I asked if Gorbachev recognised his younger self. "There is a Russian song," Gorbachev said, " 'You are still the same as you were'. Let me explain. Let me explain. Of course, outwardly, I have changed. If you look at the photos of the time you will see that. There was a different Gorbachev at that time. I had a head of hair. Ha ha. And I perhaps didn't look as stocky as I do now. At that time, I looked rather lanky, and when I put on a hat, people would say I looked like an unemployed American. So, yes, in appearance, there have been changes. Also, experience: I have had a lot of experience that in that time I didn't have - there is no doubt that the horizon of my knowledge has expanded. But Mikhail Gorbachev, in terms of morality, in terms of commitment to democracy, to democratic ways - that has not changed."

How should we take this, from a man who on graduation became deputy head of the "agitation and propaganda" department in Stavropol, and then rose and rose through the Party, and joined the Politburo at the startlingly precocious age of 47? The American writer David Remnick has described Gorbachev's political generation as "half-brave, half-cynical careerists, living a life-in-waiting for the great reformer to come along and bring Prague spring to Moscow. While they took few of the risks of the dissidents, the best of them refused to live the lie and found subtle ways of declaring at least a measure of independence from the regime... They kept something alive within themselves."

Gorbachev told me: "When I became a member of the Politburo, I learnt a lot about things that I had not known, even though I had been secretary of a Regional Party Committee and a member of the Central Party Committee for some time. When I became a member of the Politburo my view of what was happening changed for the worse, rather than for the better, and I was very very upset. My principle was try to do something. Try to do something concrete, and not let myself into a masochistic mood..."

Gorbachev was General Secretary at the age of 54. Today, Russians seem most likely to remember his despised anti-vodka campaign ("foolhardy, foolish", he concedes), his doomed loyalty to the Union, to the Party, to a socialism he was sure could be revised; and the mess and the Mafia that came after him - but Gorbachev is sure that history will view the Gorbachev years differently. He took the trouble to list his lasting achievments, in a way that his admirers in the West - those who loved the sound of the words glasnost and perestroika - never believed he would need to. "I believe," he said, "that the time will go down in history as a time when the country was able to put an end to a lack of freedom, to put an end to totalitarianism, and to move towards democracy, towards political and economic pluralism, towards glasnost, towards free elections. Without this, Russia could not contemplate a confident future, a safe future. Even though mistakes have been made under President Yeltsin, I think that all of the things that I started to do are still working. The biggest loss happened when, as a result first of the coup and then of Yeltsin's decision, the Soviet Union was abolished. Certainly we acted sometimes too late, not only on the ethnic issue, but also we acted too late to begin creating a normal market in the country, and it affected people's lives. We acted too late on reforming the Party..."

Should he have split the Party?

"I wanted to split the Party. But if I had tried to do it earlier, then the Party wouldn't have made it possible for us to come to the decisions we made about the new Union Treaty, about reforming the Soviet Union. The Party would have raised all kinds of obstacles. The Party was a very, very strong machine. And look, so many attempts have been made in recent years to break its backbone, and the Party keeps reviving out of the ashes like a phoenix, keeps reviving. So this is different. I had to handle it very gingerly. I believe that you could not handle the Party in a frivolous manner. The Party included not only the so-called nomenklatura, it included many ordinary people who wanted to do something good, and who deserved respect... In the autumn of 1991, there would have been a Party Congress that would have definitely split the party into different factions."

Instead, on 18 August 1991, while on holiday on the Black Sea with his wife, daughter and grandchildren, Mikhail Gorbachev discovered that his five telephone lines were dead. "I was not scared. I had no fear. Not at all. I am really not someone who is haunted by fears. Certainly when I picked up the receivers of all the telephones, and none was working, I understood that something terrible had happened. But I didn't react with my heart, it was more with my brain. I understood that the situation was grave, so first I spoke to Raisa, then to the rest of my family, and I said that something terrible had happened, there might be serious consequences, and I said, I want you to know that I will not yield to any kind of pressure, I will not concede on matters of principle. And I'm very pleased to say that after that - I really am very proud of my family - after that all of them said: it's up to you to decide. Whatever happens we shall support you. But yes, I felt a lot of anger, I felt indignation, because I saw that the coup plotters included people I had helped in their career. And of all the negative things about any person, I really hate betrayal most of all. I value most of all trustworthiness, openness, and candour. This is how I am, how I've always been. When I was a young man, among my friends I was always in a way a radical because I was always candid, very frank. Later in life I understood it is sometimes necessary to be a tactician, to make compromises, sometimes to retreat, but the most important test of a person happens not in times of victory but in days of defeat."

A double line of guards was set around the dacha. Gorbachev lost his nuclear command ("The power supply was cut. It was done in my presence. My officers did that. I cannot give you the technical details, but without me the button could not be used"), and a delegation from Moscow invited his resignation. In the Memoirs, Gorbachev said he "lost his cool", and "swore at them, Russian-style". I asked Gorbachev what he actually said, and he laughed, and said it was unprintable. "The Americans would say 'Up your ass' or something. I kind of told them where to go."

Gorbachev looked at a clock. "Perhaps," he said politely, "we can continue this conversation in London." I started to get up, then quickly asked Gorbachev about his taste in American films. He leant forward in his chair, enlivened, and I sat down again, and he talked for a few more minutes, ignoring the chimes of the grandfather clock. He is an enthusiast of Americana (one journalist, seeing Gorbachev savour small-town America in 1992, referred to him as "Humbert Humbert on his own") but he is still a 1950s graduate of Moscow State University, an enemy of vodka, Lenin's heir. There is a critical earnestness in his enthusiasm, which seems Soviet and post- Soviet at the same time.

"The last American film I saw? It was a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger." Schwarzenegger, I said, had been in Moscow the previous night, with Luke Perry and Patrick Swayze, for the opening of the Moscow Planet Hollywood. "Yes, yes, indeed. Eraser. It is on videotape now. It is about the FBI and their effort to save some people threatened by the Mafia. They are given new personalities, they use computers to change their faces and everything, but then it becomes concerned with the struggles within the FBI. It purports to show that even within the FBI there are people connected with the Mafia... so it has a political subtext, and is quite interesting. I have seen many American films - I prefer American social dramas."

He has not seen Pulp Fiction, "but Oliver Stone gave me the tape of JFK. I also like several movies about the Vietnam War. I like the way the war was treated by those American artists. I was impressed by Platoon, it's a good film, but" - suddenly remembering - "more than Platoon I was impressed by..." - there was a debate here with the interpreter about the English title - "...Yes, The Deer Hunter. It shows the syndrome of the Marines, who had been fighting in the jungle, involved in deadly battle, so doing deadly battle became part of their mentality, and so they went hunting - they left behind their families - and they went hunting for people. It's a very, very impressive piece of art. Yes, I've seen American films. I like Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro. I have seen a lot of them, and I could list quite a few. On the other hand, of course, most of the American action films just contain gore and blood, and violence, and this is not something that I like."

He stopped, then started again: "On the other hand, even some films starring Sylvester Stallone are quite worthwhile. Rocky is a good film. Unlike Rambo. Rambo is just gore and violence. Rocky is a good film."

Gorbachev talked me through the plot of one more film and then said he was going home to his house in the country, to celebrate his wedding anniversary. He said he had bought his wife a present but chose not to tell me what it was. He raised his eyebrows, and gave me a thumbs-up.

Gorbachev's press secretary had given me a book of Gorbachev's recent speeches and sayings, the stuff of his new career in international speaking and fundraising. It was called The State of The World: Revisioning Global Priorities. I opened it in Moscow Airport two days later, on my way home. "The spirit of co-operation must replace competition," I read. "Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a harmony between nature and man." Also: "We must return to the well-known human values that were embodied in the ideals of Christianity and other religions and also in the socialist ideas that inherited much from these values." And so on.

Why was this all so familiar - this vague, gentle, pinky-green way of thinking? I realised it was because I had just spent the evening with Mikhail Ivanov, the retired lathe operator who lives in a house smelling of apples and cabbages, a man who is the same age as Mikhail Gorbachev, who has lived through the same history, who thinks the same thoughts about co-operation and harmony, and who earlier this summer voted for General Alexander Lebed. !