It’s become a kind of a stereotype that Mikhail Gorbachev was wildly popular in the west, and totally unpopular in Russia. It is more complicated than that. When he died, huge numbers of people wanted to say farewell to him at the Hall of Columns in the centre of Moscow. The state organisers of the funeral had told us we shouldn’t allocate too much time for the farewell. But thousands upon thousands of people did come. Gorbachev’s daughter, Irina, said that she would sit in that big hall, where he was lying in state, as long as people still wanted to come. She was there for many hours.
I started working as Gorbachev’s translator when I was 36, in 1985. I was with him through all the negotiations on ending the cold war and the nuclear arms race. But the real friendship between us started after he had stepped down in 1991 and I continued as his translator and adviser for international and media relations. He didn’t travel with a huge retinue of people. So for nearly 30 years I was involved in just about everything, from checking in at the hotel, to meetings with US presidents and the British prime ministers. I witnessed him, too, as a husband and a father and grandfather at the heart of their wonderful family. And I saw him practically every day in the office, until his health began to decline. Even until the end of last year, he was still active from his hospital room, responding to requests for articles, reactions to events.
