Does anyone else marvel at Mikhail Gorbachev's writing appearing the in the New York Times? That, if nothing else, is a sign of how far we've come from the cold war days.
I think any major English language periodical would publish his editorial, which generates more high-brow interest in the English speaking world than in his own country. He has absolutely no influence in Russia today, or for quite some time.
I once had a Ukrainian immigrant barber, who maintained Gorbachev's Russian was very pedestrian, but he had a great English interpretor who could translate on the spot into prosaic English. He (the barber) was very opinionated, and I have never seen anyone make this claim in print.
Gorbachev has a tremendous command of Russian, but he used it in a way somewhat opposite to that of Hemingway. When he was first elected, people were glued to the TVs to listen to a man who could speak quickly, with an energetic voice, discuss the issues, and do it all without reading from a piece of paper (a huge novelty back then). But he could talk for hours without actually saying anything. The English articles are far more matter of fact - they get to the point much faster than Gorbachev ever did in Russian.
