Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union. During his tenure as leader of the Soviet Union, I was engaged with American and Soviet colleagues in a project known as the Global Thinking Project. From 1981 – 2001, hundreds of Americans and Soviets (later Russians) collaborated with each other, lived in each others homes in the Soviet Union and in the northern and coastal areas of the Georgia (USA). They attended each others schools, research institutes and universities. They participated in one of the first Internet collaborations between not only Americans and Russians, by educators and students in Australia, Czech Republic, Spain, and other countries.

Glasnost and Perestroika

I believe that Gorbachev’s reforms of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) had a profound influence on the work we had started with our Soviet colleagues. When I first went to the Soviet Union (1981), it was the first time that I had traveled out of the country. In January 1981, my mother traveled by bus from my childhood home in Natick, Mass. to Boston City Hall to get my birth certificate. I didn’t have a passport. In late February, 1981 I walked in snow that was falling on Red Square, the first of many walks in Moscow, and later five other cities in Russia, Soviet Georgia, and Ukraine.

Before Gorbachev came into power, I was in the Soviet Union during the period when Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were successive General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They all died within four years of each other. One of the schools in Moscow (School 710) that our project was deeply involved with, was the school attended by Brezhnev’s children.

Traveling to the USSR

Starting in 1981 I began traveling and collaborating with Soviet psychologists and educators and did this travel until 2001 but continued my collaboration even to now. Hundreds of us were involved trying to make the world safer and more trusting. I still believe that crossing cultures makes the world a better place.

Effects of Glasnost

By 1986 our collaboration had become more intense and we began to trust one another. Gorbachev’s new policies of glasnost (allowing more openness for discussion of policy) and perestroika (restructuring) had a positive effect on our work. We wrote a long-term agreement between Georgia State University (where I was professor) and the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Exchanges began whereby we and the Soviets reciprocated at least annually exchanging teachers and professors and eventually teenagers whereby the students lived in each other’s homes for several weeks doing school, environmental research, and being with people from a different culture.

Soviet and Russian Citizens in Georgia

The first delegation of Soviets came to Atlanta in 1987 where they each lived in an American home, visited and talked with students and teachers in several Atlanta area schools. The Soviet also co-hosted with their American counter-parts, a conference on Glasnost and Perestroika at GSU. Several hundred local educators and professors attended the two day conference. From this point on, hundreds of Russian professors, researchers, teachers and students participated in exchanges with their American counterparts throughout the state of Georgia with the project focused at Georgia State University. I wrote a good about the experiences with Russians in my new book The Trump Files which can viewed and purchased at this link.

Gorbachev and Muratov

I respected Gorbachev not only while he led Soviet Union into a different world but also his work for open journalism in Russia and environmental sustainability. In 1993, Gorbachev was award the Nobel peace prize. He gave part of the money to help set up a newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. They purchased computers with the donation,

Novaya Gazeta is an independent media company that was established because of Gorbachev’s help. It was founded by Dmitry Muratov, who won the Nobel Peach Prize himself in 2021. He gave all of the money to the journalists working at Novaya Gazeta. Because of the war in Ukraine, the Putin government censored news about the “special operation in Ukraine.” From the beginning of the war in Ukraine, independent media outlets in Russia, Putin blocked one website after another. Six Novaya Gazeta journalists were murdered, beginning in 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down near her apartment building.

On March 22, 2022, Muratov sold his Nobel medal at auction, donating the funds to UNICEF to benefit Ukraine. It sold for $103.5 million, the highest ever recorded for a Nobel medal.

Two days ago, a Russian court stripped the newspaper’s media license.

On September 3, 2022, Dmitry Muratov led the funeral procession for Mikhail Gorbachev.