The Peterstroika had very much to do with the relaxation of tensions between the Soviet Union and the West. Political observer Eduard Sorokin was bearing witness to the important developments of that time… 

“First and foremost, Perestroika signaled the end of the Cold War period of East-West confrontation,” Edouard Sorokin says. “All those years Radio Moscow International, that’s the name we had back in those days, was waging a propaganda war with the Voice of America, the BBC, the Deutsche Welle. Mutual accusations were flying freely and not all of them were well founded, you know. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s advent to power in March 1985, things started to change. Actually, this is exactly when detente began for real between us and the United States. Before long we had our leaders meeting in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and on Malta…”

The last two summits made a particularly deep impression on Eduard who was covering the events as apart of a Soviet media team.

“Washington looked so new and strange to me,” Edouard Sorokin recalls. “Only recently Ronald Reagan was calling the Soviet Union an evil empire and now we had him and Mikhail Gorbachev sitting right next to each other and speaking about our two superpowers moving closer together, seeing eye to eye on many international issues, including disarmament. Quite naturally, the statements made by the two leaders were top news here at Radio Moscow International…

Things looked very much the same on Malta in December 1989. Bad weather was a big factor there because the presidents were to meet on board a Soviet and US warships. Much to everyone surprise, there was a severe storm breaking out that nearly tore the ships off their moorings forcing Gorbachev and Bush Sr. to move to a Soviet passenger liner, the Maxim Gorky.

The gale force winds were lifting cars up in the air, uprooting trees and making our work a real nightmare…

We still managed to provide an extensive coverage of the Malta summit. The very moment the two leaders left the island the storm calmed down, the sun came out and life returned to normal again.

Looking back to the early days of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, we had pretty strained relations with the Americans, Europeans and the Chinese too. The Soviet forces were bogged down in Afghanistan. And still the Cold War ice began to melt, as we were busy mending fences with Washington and Beijing.  The Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall went down.

All of us working here at Radio Moscow had a feeling there was something very important going on, and our commentaries fully reflected the high hopes we had at the moment. Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which everyone saw as international recognition of our peaceful foreign policy. There was a string of very unfortunate events that followed however that eventually brought about the Soviet breakup of 1991 and led to the emergence of a number of independent states in where once was the united Soviet Union.  Russia was the biggest such state and the developments that have since been happening here deserve a separate examination. However, our foreign policy of strengthening global stability and security, cementing mutually-rewarding partnerships with the leading powers, building a bipolar world order, strict compliance with international law and increasing the role of the United Nations Organization, has hardly changed, really.