Gorbachev also took a shot at the international community—and Harvard—for its mistakes in attempts to assist his country in decentralizing its economy during the Yeltsin years.
“I’m not blaming Harvard, but a few people from Harvard imposed a model that was too radical for Russia,” he said.
He alluded to the efforts of the Harvard Institute for International Development, which received $50 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development to advise Russian economists during the 1990s but is the basis of a suit against the University filed by the federal government for conflict of interest policy violations.
Prioritizing “universal human values” and international cooperation should be the focus of political leaders today, said Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
He also said that “no nation should try to govern the world from one center” and framed the United States’ tensions with Iraq as a conflict between employing “military force” or “international law” to resolve disputes.
“I welcome the agreement in the Security Council,” he added, referring to a resolution on Iraq weapons inspections that was approved unanimously last week.
In response to a question on Russia’s three-year war with Chechen separatists, Gorbachev said, “If I were president of my country, there wouldn’t have been this war in the first place.”
He said he thought Chechnya should “be a republic within Russia but it should have a special autonomous status.”
In the first part of his speech, the 71-year-old Gorbachev outlined the political philosophy that he followed throughout his lengthy career.
“I am a person willing to compromise, but compromise should not be at the expense of values and goals,” he said. “In all situations, I remained cool.”
“My creed has been to select a team of strong individuals, not to be afraid one would be a competitor,” he added.
He said that he had been shaped by living through Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the Nazi occupation of his home district during World War II and the country’s rebuilding period following the war. He also cited Nikita S. Khrushchev’s celebrated “Secret Speech” of 1956, in which he criticized Stalin for an overly repressive regime. Gorbachev said this set the youth of the time on the path that eventually led to reform.
“This was for us a breath of fresh air, a breath of freedom that remained with us,” he said. “Those who started in politics at that time had a critical approach and retained a critical approach to everything.”
The speech, sponsored by Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, was the first by Gorbachev at Harvard since he spoke at the Kennedy School of Government’s ARCO Forum in May 1992.
The Davis Center made a donation to the Gorbachev Foundation to secure the former president’s visit to Harvard, although University spokesperson Chris Ahearn said he did not know the amount.
Free tickets for the event, handed out last week, were gone in just an hour and a half.
University President Lawrence H. Summers and Davis Center Director Timothy Colton, Feldberg professor of government and Russian studies, introduced Gorbachev.
“I thought it was exciting to hear the perspective of the man who was there,” Summers said after the speech.
—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.