Gorbachev - The Miracle Man
Cinema for Peace honorary patron Mikhail Gorbachev has left our world on its own.
by Jaka Bizilj
Berlin / Moscow - After Nelson Mandela and Muhammed Ali the last living icon of mankind, who changed the world, has left us. All were honorary patrons of Cinema for Peace, but Gorbachev was closest to us.
The man with the famous birthmark on his head was “ein Glücksfall der Geschichte” for us in Berlin and the world - “a lucky case of history”. With his attempt to transform the Soviet Union with “Glasnost” (openness) and “Perestroika” (change) he became the “syntax error” of communism: by trying to transform it into pluralism and democracy he destroyed it - and gave more than one billion people freedom; for the Russian people for the first time in 1000 years.
Cinema for Peace will offer a memorial art installation by Ai Weiwei to the mayor of Berlin and to chancellor Scholz, reminding how Gorbachev ended the Cold War, the oppression of communism, and allowed the Berlin Wall to fall (also by letting the tanks in the “garrisons”) and German unification, including a last-minute showdown thriller in Moscow with foreign minister Genscher in the night of September 11/12 1991. Also to remember that he was raised half Ukrainian and half Russian, and enabled Ukraine and other former Soviet republics to become independent - accepting the loss of his beloved Soviet Union and his presidency by refusing military force - the opposite of Putin today.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Leonardo DiCaprio initiating the "Green Oscar"
Gorbachev introduced the “Green Oscar” at our Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin with Leonardo DiCaprio, he announced and inspired our The Wall Museum in Berlin, he told us his life story in Moscow and asked me to produce a feature film about his life for which I introduced him to Tom Hanks and got the generous support of Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he shared the secret that he spoke German - since his school time in the remote Caucasus. With tears in his eyes, he told us the story of how his father was called dead in the fight against Hitler - and reappeared alive in his home village of Privolnje, a place where 10 years before relatives had starved to death during Stalin's brutal reign. Both grandfathers were arrested at some point, one of them was “cooked” over open fire by Joseph Stalin’s torturers. This is why his mother refused to name the child “Joseph” and baptized him as “Mikhail”.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Jaka Bizilj, and Leonardo DiCaprio at Cinema for Peace Berlin
We hosted Gorbachev in Berlin four times, including on the occasion of the 20th and 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall when we also hosted a democracy summit with his foundation at Brandenburg Gate. We honored Gorbachev for the peaceful fall of the wall alongside Harald Jäger, who opened the first border gate at the Wall on November 9 1989 instead of shooting, Stanislav Petrov, who refused to launch a nuclear counterattack in 1983 despite (false) nuclear alarms and protocol, and the former prime minister of Hungary Miklos Nemeth, who opened the Iron curtain - while US President George Bush sr. contributed prayers for Gorbachev together with his wife Barbara.
Gorbachev was a „Mensch“. He loved and missed his wife Raissa until his very last day, he released Sacharov and political prisoners and helped the Jewish people. In university, the former peasant boy defended his Jewish friend Lieberman (who became a leading figure in the Prague uprising in 1968) against anti-semitism and won the heart of his future wife Raissa. When the Scorpions sang “Wind of change” with a children's choir for him, he wept. When his wife died of leukemia he supported her foundation to heal children from leukemia. When he learned in Berlin that his dear friend Hans-Dietrich Gescher, who had so masterfully orchestrated the German reunification, was too sick to join us before his meeting with chancellor Merkel, Gorbachev took my cell phone and announced to his friend: "If you can’t come to us, I will come to you."
Mikhail Gorbachev initiating "The School Film Catalogue" at Cinema for Peace
Gorbachev probably saved the world from destruction and gave his people freedom. Nevertheless, he is not popular in Russia. One day at a screenplay workshop he told me in dismay that he had watched on TV a competition about which person harmed Russia most - and that he was put in third place. It really hurt him. Gorbachev is considered in Russia as a weak leader and as too soft and indecisive. But history indicates that only his zigzag between reforms and the expectations of the old nomenklatura as well as between the quest for democracy and the demands of the KGB and the Red Army enabled him to stay in power long enough as „syntax error of communism“ until it was too late to stop his pathway into a new millennium without the oppression of communism and the nuclear threat of human extinction. Even a coup in August 1991 by his own leadership, when Gorbachev was arrested in Crimea, could not turn back the clock anymore.
This miracle man managed to have thousands of party delegates vote unanimously for elections with more than one candidate: this was the birth of democracy in Russia and the Soviet Union. The delegates celebrated their vote by singing the Internationale - while just half a year later most of them were voted out of office, and one year later communism had reached its termination point.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Jaka Bizilj, and Tom Hanks in Berlin
The miracle man nearly even abolished all nuclear arms from the face of earth together with Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik - and failed to do so by a single word: Gorbachev insisted that the “Star Wars” program of the USA would be limited to the “laboratory” as a precondition to giving up ALL nuclear missiles. But at least a friendship had developed between “the cowboy” and “the demagogue” to quote each other’s descriptions, half of the nukes were abandoned one year later and the miracle man gave the New Years address to the people of America, while Reagan addressed the people of the Soviet-Union. Gorbachev’s UN speech in 1988 and his Nobel prize acceptance address serve as a blueprint and memorandum for a just world of the 21. century - addressing social justice, freedom, human rights, and environmental protection. Gorbachev was even a founder of the Green Cross and opposed all nuclear dangers after the lessons of Chernobyl (where he also learned that Soviet propaganda had to stop).
Gorbachev could be very decisive actually, also in private. He asked me in Moscow to exchange my American girlfriend with a Russian girlfriend (what I did not), or he spoke as long as he felt appropriate, no matter how many signals we gave him - for example on BBC’s “HARDtalk”, where a presenter in full despair failed to ask him more than 2 questions in one hour. When I invited „Gorbi“ for a private dinner with his delegation in Berlin at the Borchardt restaurant and he realized that there is none of his favorite German dish „Eisbein“ (pork knuckle), he stood up, marched out, and into a next door brewery which offered this dish - to be welcomed by a silenced German crowd in disbelief, which started cheering - after recovering from shock - „Gorbi, Gorbi“ and clapping rhythmically with standing ovations. The German people knew or felt: this is the miracle man, the man who brought down the Berlin Wall and allowed German reunification and ended with this the aftermath of World War II. It was not the end of history as Fukuyama claimed - but it was the happy end of a bloody 20th century.
For the 21st century Gorbachev has announced: it will be either a new renaissance of mankind or an era of total destruction. Russia will lead by example on this - it will either establish the horrible rule of power back again in a world dominated by military threat, or it will succumb to a renaissance of western democracy and to the power of rules - and a new Gorbachev might arise in Russia.
(The Russian people will need to end the barbaric and vicious war against Ukraine and find their new Gorbachev. Cinema for Peace will keep supporting the dissidents and their films like we did with Pussy Riot and Alexei Navalny, whom we evacuated from Siberia to Berlin to save his life. Now it will be up to all these dissidents and critical minds in Russia to stand up against Putin’s dictatorship, stop the war against Ukraine, and spread the spirit of Gorbachev.)
Cinema for Peace: Danke Gorbi
Meeting Gorbachev (2018)
Gorbachev discuss nuclear weapons, reunification of Germany, and dissolution of his country.
GORBACHEV. HEAVEN (2020)
Mikhail Gorbachev looks back on the ups and downs of his long and eventful political career.