USA Today Interviews Gorbachev

There is a fascinating, if too brief, interview with Mikhail Gorbachev in today’s USA Today. During the interview, Gorbachev not only defends Putin’s “reforms,” but opines that the Soviet Union should have been preserved. Here’s a snippet:

Q:Many Russians criticize you because in their opinion, you gave away the Soviet empire and weakened Russian power. Is this characterization accurate?

A: The Soviet Union could have been preserved and should have been preserved. … I wanted to decentralize the Soviet Union and give the maximum amount of rights to the republics as guaranteed under the constitution, while preserving in the center the most important functions such as defense, diplomacy, coordination. That was it.

The full interview is here.