Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev addresses a packed house at Sanders Theatre yesterday on perestroika and capitalism in Russia.

In a widely anticipated campus appearance—his first in a decade—former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev looked back yesterday on the era of perestroika that he had engineered.

Through an interpreter, Gorbachev told a packed Sanders Theatre that he believes the restructuring, which involved limited privatization of the Soviet economy, was a success even though economic problems plagued Russia throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

He argued those who criticized his economic reforms as coming too slowly failed to recognize the difficulty of effecting change from within the repressive party structure.

“If you insist on an unrealistic pace of change, it is reckless,” he said.

“When I was being accused of not being resolute enough, I said we would need at least 20 or 30 years to put perestroika on track,” he added.

During six years as head of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party, Gorbachev instituted economic and social reforms that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the introduction of capitalism.

In response to questions following his speech he said he had neglected to ensure that the increased money flow from the partially decentralized economy actually led to a stable consumer market.

“People tend to make their judgments based on what they see in the stores,” he said. “The result was that people were wondering, they were asking, maybe Gorbachev was not the best leader.”

He recalled one opponent telling him, when he resigned as president in 1991, that “the era of Gorbachev is over.” But Gorbachev said he thought then—and now—that the “era of Gorbachev is just beginning.”

“The choice in favor of freedom, democracy, market economics, in favor of political pluralism—this is something we are still mastering,” he said.

A 1995 poll by the Gorbachev Foundation, which the former president heads, found that 42 percent of Russians thought the economic reforms were necessary in retrospect, while 45 percent did not. These results were “very positive,” he said.

“The poll was happening in 1995, when people had been badly affected by the breakup of the country,” Gorbachev said. “When most of the people in Russia lived in poverty and hardship, 42 percent said perestroika was necessary.”

Support for political reforms such as democratic elections and freedom of religion were far higher, he said.

“I believe this is an endorsement and grounds for hope that after a period of hardship and difficulty, people will build a new Russia, a free and democratic Russia,” he said.

He said that it was too early to evaluate fully the impact of perestroika. But he said reforms under his successor, Boris Yeltsin, that moved the country further toward a market economy came with “too high a price”—rampant poverty.