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>> this week on q&a, william taubman, he discusses his book on gorbachev, his life and times. host: william taubman, a book on mikhail gorbachev. prof. taubman: gorbachev changed this country and the world. but neither as much as he wished. it is a story of great achievement and it has, in some ways, a tragic end. host: you suggest that in the book, that you spoke with him for an interview as many as eight different days. prof. taubman: yes, my wife and i had eight long interviews with him. and then several other encounters at conferences where i knew he was going to be or he invited me to show up. host: what did you see in person over those eight different interviews, and how many years were between all of those?

prof. taubman: the first interview was in 2007. the last was in 2016. what i saw apprised me. he was remarkably natural, informal, warm, humorous. he did not ask questions in advance. he did not insist on having his own interpreter. jane and i speak russian. so we did it ourselves. we recorded it. i have not met that many world leaders, so i can't compare him. but i would be surprised if many of them are as, as i say, natural and informal as he was. host: what did you learn from those interviews? prof. taubman: one thing i learned was a sense of him as a person, which i just described. in addition, i had questions that i asked over the course of those eight interviews. i had a strategy. one part of the strategy was to quote 10. i would hold up something he had said and read it and ask him to elaborate or take off from it.

the reason was i did not want him to simply repeat what he might have. the other thing was we began at the very beginning with his grandparents. i knew that he would want to talk about his time in power. much, much later. but i had been told he might only grant us one interview. it worked. the first interview took two hours. we'll my got up to 1949. sure enough, we had more. host: what were the years he was in power? prof. taubman: he was in power from march 1985, to december 25th, christmas day, 1991. six years. host: i want to go to a chapter near the end called the final days. and the start reading a little bit of it and let you pick up from there. you say that this was august to december of 1991.

gorbachev finally began to purge his opponent the. fewer did the job for him. one of the conspirators shot his wife and then himself. former armed services chief of staff, marshall sergay who had broken with the military hardliners to become gorbachev's advisor, but was in dissolution when his boss had cut short his vacation, rushed to moscow to support the coup. he confessed in a letter what he did to gorbachev, and said i could no longer live with my fatherland. it is dying. everything i have worked for is destroyed and hanged himself. in his office. there is another one here but i will let you pick up. it seems like strong stuff. prof. taubman: it is not only strong stuff, it is very indicative of several important things.

on the one hand, it shows how disillusioned within -- with him where people who had worked with him. he had plotted against him in this coup. another joined in the progress. they had been or seem to be hardliners and they were. now they were devastated with the way the whole thing came out. it is also indicative of how much he had trusted people like them who turned against him and betrayed him. which was a devastating for him. everything was devastating for him at the end. he was really, in some ways, isolated and alone, both his former supporters had abandoned him and these colleagues who had betrayed him now killed themselves. host: and another one on this list, a man named cucina. he jumped to his death from his apartment window. what role did he play in the coup and why did he take that ction? prof. taubman: key have been a

business manager for the central community of the communist party. he had been the money man. the man who had the money, passed it to communist parties in the west, or even to terrorist groups and the west which they did nothing money traceable -- which they did not want to be money traceable. god knows what else he did. he felt he was compromised by what he had done and i guess could not face the future. host: at the beginning of the chapter, you talk about mrs. gorbachev and the letters, and later, the 25 notebooks mikhail gorbachev. what is that story? prof. taubman: mrs. gorbachev burned at the letters her husband sent to her when she kept a few. i have seen the few she kept. they were wonderfully clear indications of his state of mind. he wrote her one when he was a young man working in the provinces. he was utterly disillusioned

with what he saw there. the way the communist party operated. the way the bureaucrats operated. there must have been more to her they must have been wonderful and she burned them all because she did not want them ever to fall into the them ever to fall into the hands of the kind of people who had put them under house arrest. in the summer of august 1991. he burned notebooks, he kept a lot of notebooks in which in colored ink he entered notes to themselves -- to himself. all of this would have been a gold mine for a biographer. but that pales in comparison to the pain they must have felt as they destroyed this evidence of their lives. host: you mentioned foros. where is it? prof. taubman: is at the

southern tip of crimea where gorbachev had a beautiful too luxurious villa. he had an advisor who had thought, until he saw the this villa, that gorbachev was a selfless political leader. when you saw this villa, he said it god, this is too much. it has an escalator leading down to the beach. he writes, i was disillusioned by that. i followed up on this. i asked gorbachev about this. he said it was designed before i came into power. i am a too, have my own reservations about it. host: why did he use it? prof. taubman: it was something that appalled him in other ways. i suppose, he was a man who rose from humble beginnings, as did his wife. i think one of their weaknesses, of which they had several, was that they were -- they felt they deserved to live well because they were doing so much for their country and had such a cost psychologically to themselves.

host: i want to get to the coup in a minute. two things in your book i wanted you to say more about. after he was out of power, you say forbes had a jet for him to travel the united states. prof. taubman: yes. after he was out of power, he made a lot of speeches. he traveled to american cities. i believe he appeared on your program and many others. he did this to continue to spread this message to the world. he thought it was relevant as well as to his own country. but also to make money. partly for himself, but also to upport his foundation. boris yeltsin when he retired, he had a presidential library built. the government paid for it, i believe, probably raised money privately, too. gorbachev received no support from the government.

they let him alone. he had to raise money to create a foundation, staff it, build a building for it. it did a lot of good work, charitable, and enlightenment and in -- and educational. he need ed money for that. host: you say ted turner gave him $1 million? to do what? prof. taubman: to build a building for the foundation after the first building, which the government let him use, for a while. i think less than one year. it was taken away. boris succeeded him as president. the two hated each other. yeltsin had granted him the building of -- on the condition that gorbachev would not criticize him. gorbachev could not keep quiet. after yeltsin bombarded the parliaments with weapons and after inflation boomed and unemployment grew, gorbachev started criticizing him very

severely and yeltsin got mad nd took away his toys. host: i want to show you video of a press conference he had at the end of the coup attempt and have you talk about the queue. >> a number of people came and demanded a meeting with me. i do not know about such meetings. no one warned me about it. and why these people were here. the head of mike darda said he knew about it, and i said why did you let them through? he told me the head of the kgb and administration he was with them. host: he is speaking, obviously, at a press conference. he is talking about what happened when the coup attempt was underway. can you explain what the coup is all about and what were these -- these circumstances when they try to do this? prof. taubman: the coup occurred in august, 1991.

gorbachev had gone on vacation. he was dead tired. his wife had said, let's go. the agreed to go. in retrospect, this was foolish. machiavelli would have told him not to leave town. because when a top leader who was besieged with critics leave town, they have an opening. they see -- they seized it. they sent a delegation to his villa on the black sea and they put him under house arrest. they confronted him with an ultimatum. either you agree with what we are about to do, which was to crush the very program gorbachev was carrying out and reverse his policies -- these policies, or you stay under ouse arrest. he refused to bless what they were going to do. they went back to moscow to figure out what to do in his absence. he remained under house arrest. for two or three days until in

moscow, people, tens of thousands came out on the street to protect his cause. yeltsin climbed up on a tank and mobilized the resistance and the plotters gave up and returned to release him. he put them under arrest. host: where was yeltsin at the time of the coup attempt and whose side was he on? prof. taubman: when the coup attempt began was in the capital of kazakhstan. hugh flew back to moscow. and for some reason, probably because the coup plotters turned out to be the keystone cops, they failed to arrest him. my theory is that they hoped to get him to join them against gorbachev. but he refused. he instead went to the white house, as it was called. the seat of the russian government. at this point, russia was still part of the soviet union. he mobilized resistance.

e thwarted the coup. the fact that they thought he might be a willing participant goes to show how angry and hostile gorbachev he was to -- he was to gorbachev at that ime. host: what was his job at that time. professor: he was president of the russian republic. host: he was one of the 15 republics of the soviet union. by that time, the baltics were breaking away and others were breaking away, too. host: back to the coup. how did they do it? how many people were involved? how many people -- security did mr. gorbachev have and pain that picture more. prof. taubman: this delegation from moscow, which included the chief of the armed forces, gorbachev's chief of staff and others arrived at his house. by the time they entered, they had replaced the guards, most

of the guards around the complex. with their own people. they had put trucks or buses blocking the road. apparently, he had about 35 other personal bodyguards whom they did not replace. those bodyguards remained loyal to him. one of the questions that has risen about this whole coup is why didn't he mobilize his bodyguards against the guards whom the plotters had brought? some of the speculation comes from a plotter -- plotters themselves who claimed falsely, in my view, that gorbachev was part of the plot. there are a couple of other historians who have speculated that gorbachev was part of the plot. this, to me, is totally false. the reason i believe it is false is that if he had tried to mobilize his guards against those guards, there surely would have been a fire fight. in that fire fight, he and

possibly his wife, and his daughter and granddaughters who were there, may have been killed. they did not have to be killed for him to want to avoid this. because what happened during the coup was that she, without that, had a stroke, and he was deeply devoted to her, and he surely would have known that to be part of a coup against himself would have led to something like that. it is interesting that i think the best evidence we have against this, that he was involved, is his relationship with his wife. he never would have done hat. host: what was she like? prof. taubman: his wife? most people watching will remember her. she was lovely, smart, she was sophisticated. she was an intellectual. she was a professor of philosophy, she was also rather didactic and humorless. she made, in some circles, a wonderful impression.

the soviet first lady to look like one and behave like one. she really antagonize people, including soviet women who thought, who the hello legislated her? nobody. to be her -- his advisor. the other person she antagonized was nancy reagan who cannot stand her. and with whom it she had several colorful clashes which i was very careful to include in my book. host: from 1987, here is mrs. corbett -- mrs. gorbachev and mrs. reagan at the white house. > it is an official house. i would say that a human being would like to live

in a regular home. and indeed it is like a museum. of the history of america. host: there is the chemistry. prof. taubman: that is one of the scenes i describe in the book. when nancy talks about the white house as a museum -- sorry, when she talks about the white house looking like a museum, nancy thinks to herself, she has not been upstairs where we live. at another point, nancy wants to show her a portrait of richard nixon on the wall. and mrs. gorbachev who has some sense of great art isn't nterested. she wants to talk about the other art, which in her view, is greater art. she wants to go on. and nancy touches her arm and wants to pull her further into the white house. and she says no, i want to talk o the press.

when they meet in moscow, nancy turns the tables on her and does the same thing. she wants to leave nancy on, and nancy says no, i want to talk to the press. host: what was the relationship with mrs. gorbachev after she had the stroke? what happened between the year she had the stroke in the year when she died, 1999? what was her lifelike than? prof. taubman: she died of leukemia which was not diagnosed until 1999. he was game. she continued to play the role of no longer first lady, but the wife, she would travel with im. when he ran for president of russia in 1996, which i'm afraid was a fools errand because he ended up getting less than 1% of the vote, but he campaigned like crazy. she, who had never gotten over

the injury of that stroke, she could function. but she was not herself anymore. she was scarred by all the criticism coming his way. she dragged herself with him to all the 20 cities on that campaign. she was with him when they would not let him speak at a hall on one occasion when one of his critics spat in his face. this must have been torture for her as well as for him. host: what did you find out from him about the way he felt about the public he used to lead turning on him? prof. taubman: he trusted the rut -- the soviet people. he trusted them to follow him where they had never gone before. that is, to democratize their country. in a few short years. he trusted them to follow him as he moved to the country toward a market economy. from a command economy. he trusted them to follow him and trust him as he made peace in the cold war against the ancient enemy, the united states.

he trusted them too much, it turned out. they turned against him. they had good reasons, economic conditions crashed, they lost their empire which meant a lot up -- a lot to some of them. in eastern europe. the soviet union began to fall apart at the seams. by the time he was ousted, he ad few supporters. by the time he was ousted, he had few supporters. that pained him immensely. host: when did the soviet union become the soviet union? prof. taubman: lennon wanted to

set up more than a nationstate. he wanted to set up an international stage. he believed that all of these countries, former countries, coming together would form a kind of colonel of the world he wanted to see come about in the end. nations joining together in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. there was an element of compulsion and force. ome were forced to join. others were given the idea of independence. the national anthem, a parliament. sometimes a foreign minister. but it was phony because the real power was in the hands of the communist party which was quickly centralized. host: the language, i want to run a clip of mr. gorbachev when he came in for the interview and the question had to do, can you speak english? >> do you understand english? >> to some extent, yes. when one meets with people often and when you talk about

things as you would translate it being translated, you begin to learn. it is a teaching process. host: language or you said you and your wife speak russian. tell us what jane, your wife's involvement was and your research part? prof. taubman: jane speaks etter russian than i do. she taught russian for 50 years n amherst college. in russian. she has a general vocabulary. put me in a garden, i am speechless. he knows about the garden.

and we spoke with gorbachev, i understood a lot but not all. she understood almost all, but not all. there was one funny moment when he was describing a garden. he was describing what was growing in his grandfather's garden as he grew up as a boy in southern russia. jane did not know the word for - jane, may i ask you? >> cherry plums. prof. taubman: two did not know the russian word for cherry plum. gorbachev said see, your russian is not perfect. he gave her a short was in in the vocabulary for cherry plums and other related plants. host: how much english did he understand? prof. taubman: i do not think he understood much. host: what difference does that make an international relations and how many of the world leaders speak english? prof. taubman: a lot of them speaking wish. especially today. he russians did not. andre grimico after years of jousting with the foreign minister and every american secretary of state spoke a lot of english.

not gorbachev. when i wanted to convince him to support me in writing his biography, i sent him a copy of my book in english. of khrushchev. he took it but when it was time to read it, he turned to the russian translation. i must say, i was nervous when i encountered him and he came up to me and patted me on the arm and said, good, solid book, he said in russian. which i took as sufficient praise from a man who i later learned is somewhat chary about praising other people. host: about 14 years ago, you and i did two one hour program on your khrushchev book. it is available in our archive. if you want to catch up with what you were saying back then. prof. taubman: can i take a moment to tell your audience with my website is? it is williamtaubmanbooks.com. it has other stuff on it about interviews with gorbachev and reviews about the book. i will not go on about it. host: did you record your interviews or did you write it out? prof. taubman: we recorded

them. we recorded them on a portable tape recorder and then we started recording them on an ipad and a cell phone. we transcribed them all. i could not catch every word. host: what are you going to do with all that? prof. taubman: i don't know. i'm certainly saving them. it has been suggested by somebody that they could become a program or radio program or television program or a book. of course, i do not have gorbachev's permission to do use them for anything but interviews for my book. i would have to look into that. i should add there is going to be a russian edition of my book. when he got a copy, which i sent him of the english edition, he sent back and said i thank you from my heart, but i will not give you my impressions of your book until i read the russian edition. now i am waiting for those impressions. host: he is 86 years old. here is an interview he did

with bbc last year. one of the things you notice is is different appearance. i do not know them all. i presume some of them have required being treated with medication which may have bloated his face. he has lost more than a tep. he is a man who used to walk 20

kilometers at a drop of a hat. now he uses a cane. he lifts himself from a chair with great difficulty. he still has got it up here. that quote in that interview was interesting. he was going back and remembering his fall from power. and the possibility that he could have attempted to mobilize the army on his behalf to save him and the soviet union. and he declined to do so. this was one of the wonderful things about him. he gave up power with dignity. he did not use force. he always tried to resist using force. he did not want to shed blood. host: if you took a poll in ussia today or in the entire

15 countries of the sows -- of the soviet union and a pole and the united states, how would he rank in those two different laces? prof. taubman: i'm afraid in russia, and i presume and most of the old soviet union, he would rank low. i would be guessing, but i would say maybe a positive rating of 30% at most. in this country, i don't know, i would say 67 -- 60%, 70%, maybe more. he is a man who is beloved in the rest of the world but despised by too many in his own land. host: what are we missing? looking at russia, what is it other than -- you mentioned the economy. what else did they not want that he was bringing to? prof. taubman: they were a superpower. for 10 years after the they left, they were a train wreck. they had not only an economy

that was in decent enough's cheap to support them, but they had decent medical care and social security and things like that. now, much of it has been privatized and a lot of people cannot afford it. they have lost an empire. not everybody loves an empire. not everybody should love an empire. but they had one and they lost it. some of them miss it. one other element i think is although they loved gorbachev in the beginning because he followed three dead men walking, their former leaders, who were all sick and died, they loved him for his vigor, or his energy, for his articulateness as well as his program. after a while, they decided he talked too much. too long. and that he, in his desire to explain himself, he was weak.

russians like a strong leader, and have one now in putin and helps to explain some of his over well ming popularity. host: i want to put on the screen from 1917 when lenin took over. ou can see it there. if you have a moment to give us for each one of them so we can put it in perspective, you have five years with lenin, 19 years with stalin, two years with malenkov, nine years with khrushchev, 18 years with brezz neve and two years with antropov and one year with chen yanko and six years with gorbachev.

lenin was a genius in seizing power. stalin, a brutal dictator who dictatorship lenin began who raised russia up to an industrial power and helped win the war at an incredible price, 27 million killed in world war ii. host: mallen cough -- host malenchov? professor: weak. khrushchev, full of energy, color, profane, trying to make amends for his own guilt. uilty association with stalin. unmasking stalin as a criminal and being thrown out for being too erratic. host: brezhnev. professor: fresh neve presided and everyone else led and he learned if he compared the meetings he could keep power and he did.

under him, stagnation in the oviet union. host: if i were a student in high school and beginning history, what are they telling me about the early leaders, who sub and who is down? error: i don't think lenin loved putin because he made a revolution and he doesn't want a revolution against himself. he won award and putin admires that. khrushchev, i think putin probably doesn't like much because putin attacked the leadership of the cub, stalin. and putin backed out of confrontations with putin liked to think russia looked like a

coward. host: brezhnev? profess major: i think he admires brezhnev. because he kept the lid on an explosive country and a lot of ussians admire brezhnev. professor: antropov, no attention paid to him hatsoever.

gorbachev, putin says the collapse of the soviet union was the greatest

he wants influence. he speaks carefullyly about the russian president. host: talk about the gorbachev foundation for a moment. have you seen where the money comes from? professor: i know it came from his lecture fees which i know, not that i was there, not that i was a part of the transaction but i think it's been said and

admitted that he charged when e could over $100,000. he got six figures for lectures all over the world, japan, germany. there are wealthy americans who i gather wanted to help him and invited him to give lectures. he made a lot of money. he probably raised money from places we don't know about. i know ted turner helped build the structure of where the foundation exists. host: you say his daughter was vice president of the gorbachev foundation? professor: his daughter is a charming, smart woman, very tough i think as well as beautiful. and she was very loyal to him when his wife died she became his hostess, as it were, lived nearby so she could come to his aid if he ever needed it.

we're told that these days she spends a lot of time in germany. i'm sure she comes to visit him but i heard from friends he's reconciled to this because the reason she moved to germany from apart from medical reasons for her husband is she couldn't take any more being invective against him which had been flung at him all these years and she couldn't take it anymore and was a sign of how he has steeled himself to his fate, that he continued to take t. he could have lived in the united states or germany. he stayed in his country and

received the slings and air as of outrageous fortune. host: what about the government of russia and the support they're giving him now,?" professor: i don't think much if any. host: when you went with your research, it was an 11-year project and you said the khrushchev book was 20 years ago? professor: this one i did fast. host: are you teaching? professor: i stopped teaching to finish the book. i could go back but would rather find another project. i don't have one but i'm looking. host: of all the people you looked at who would be the most interesting? professor: i like to write about political leaders. if you can figure them out as

individuals, you can understand what they did to their countries in part at any rate. host: who is left? professor: bruss neve. -- brezhnev. i thought of putin. sure i have the guts to do that and i am probably too old. brian: what you say that? prof. taubman: well, because putin does not like it when people look too far into his life in some of them and up in a bad way when they do. brian: do really think you would come after you? prof. taubman: no, it is probably a fantasy of an older biographer looking for another project to think somebody would care enough about what he is doing to go after him. rian: why do you think you stayed in power for so long? professor taubman: he is shrewd, tough. he takes no prisoners. he is a veteran of the kgb.

he is seen of this world nd therefore he doesn't shrink to do what needs to be done to hang on to power. i think gorbachev's problem and part is that he did shrink from some of the things he did to stay in power. putin has read machiavelli. gorbachev talked, especially as he talked as he got older too much, too long. putin measures his words. putin can be profane. he can say some awful things to give pause to people who might think of moving against him. gorbachev was much more of a diplomat, polite. host we discover his news conference every year and i think the last one was four hours long, what's the point? professor: that's a feat of endurance as well as intellect. don't know.

if you cover it you probably can see what he's got in front f him. it's a feat of endurance and what does it tell people except you're strong intellectually, physically, you can endure. so in a way it's a feat that gives pause to his opponents and his enemies. if they need pause and they don't because he's shown them in other ways he's tough and strong. host: in doing your book, where did you travel? professor: we traveled to moscow many times and traveled to southern russia. which is north of the town where gorbachev was born. very small peasant village. we walked along the road which passed the land where his father and grandfather had a house up from a river.

we went back two times. with gorbachev's help we met people and were introduced to his former associates, friends, and colleagues. we interviewed them with our tape recorder at some length. where else did we go? actually, no, we went to other cities -- host: did you go to foros? professor: i would like to go but it is a government datra and don't think we'd be allowed in but i got a picture of it. host: back in the village where he grew up what did you know of the people who knew him? professor: didn't find anybody in the village itself but went to the high school he went to. and we met a high school kid who had been a classmate of his.

he told us a bit about gorbachev as an excellent student and a strong kid and a kid who dared to talk back to teachers. the most interesting testimony came im as a school boy from somebody we didn't meet and somebody met and interviewed and did interviews and this was his former girlfriend who talked about him and she, too, commented how he would go up to teachers and challenge them or push them to explain things he hadn't understood in class. but the most interesting thing she recalled was how he on one occasion, he chastised her for doing a bad job of editing the ll newspaper in their school and 10 minutes later asked her out to the movies and she said to him, how can you do this, how can you tell me i've done a bad job and then ask me out on a date? he answered something like, these are two entirely different spheres of activity.

and to me this was important because it conveyed his self-confident, even verging on arrogance, that he emerged from his childhood with, with the help of one other thing, he and his father won a -- they won the two highest medals the soviet union could offer for breaking records in harvesting grain on a combine and when he went on to moscow university, he rarely took off his medal as a way of showing his fellow students that in this elite institution he was no country bumpkin even though that's the way he struck check initially. host: i want host: i want to show you a couple things, first, an ad. >> mr. gorbachev?

[video clip] >> sometimes nothing bringing people together like a nice hot pizza. host: i love that ad. it's not just from pizza hut but expresses the divisions in the country about what he did and the legacy he left behind. host: 25 or more years ago, if you went to that pizza hut there in moscow and if you had dollars in one door, if you had rubbles you went in another.

it might have been true with mcdonald's where they had lines around the block. hy did they do that? guest: i presume not everybody had dollar. that must be the answer. foreigner has dollars and russians didn't and they wanted russian customers. host: what is it like in moscow or russia today compared to what it was at the time mr. gorbachev was in power? guest: it is a different world in many, many respects. first of all, physically. there are these tall skyscrapers, some of them are business buildings and others are luxurious apartment complexes. there is a traffic jam that makes new york city look like peoria. it used to be you could get somebody to take you across town in 10 or 15 minutes and the only way now to come throw to that is on the metro because otherwise you'll sit in traffic

forever. in gorbachev's time people still looked the way a lot of them had looked in earlier years, like russians and in somewhat drab clothes. you could walk down the street and tell who was a russian and who was a foreigner by looking at their shoes. you likely would be approached by bearing jeans by people who wanted to buy your jeans. now things are sale at high prices. the gorbachev years there were still long line in stores for staples as well as luxury goods. now as i say, there are supermarkets. it's a modern world city. and people travel. that is one thing you have to say for the putin regime. it's not a totalitarian regime. people can travel abroad and say what they want within limited circles. there is one newspaper which gorbachev co-owns, which speaks the truth without fear or favor. there is one radio station on which almost anything could be

said. so it is a city that differs from both gorbachev's time and before. very, very different. less russian in a sense than it used to be russian. host: why is lenin still in a tomb there in red square? guest: lenin is in a tomb probably because it would be too embarrassing and complicated to bury him elsewhere. you'd have to start explaining him, what he did, why he did it, why he was in a tomb, why you're taking him out and why do this, a lot of people wouldn't like various aspects of that explanation so let him stay. that's the way they think. host: how long, in your opinion, will mr. putin be in charge of that country? guest: let's see, he's up for re-election next year and changed the substitution he has a six-year term if re-elected and everyone assumed he'll be

re-elected and that would mean he'd be in power, and i'll explain what i mean by "power" in a minute from 2000 to 2024. there was a four-year interval he was not president, dimitri medvedev, his sidekick, was president, but it turned out putin was dominating those years that medvedev quickly bowed out when his term ended and that would be 24 years. brian, if i could go back to what you were counting up stalin's years, i think you said 17 or 19? host: yes, i did. guest: i think that's not right. because let's see, stalin -- what's the year you have there? host: you're right. it would be 29 years. 24-53. guest: that's 29 years. so putin would come close to stalin, which is a hell of an achievement in both a positive

and mostly from my point of view, the negative sense of that. host: by the way, that was my math, not yours. but where is stalin now in russia in their view? guest: stalin is in an urn buried in the kremlin wall where a lot of other soviet leaders are buried. khrushchev removed him from the moss lee up in 19 -- in the mosleum up in the -- in the dark night and under guard. and a poem was wrote about it. where is stalin otherwise? well, i'm afraid, i read recently but don't remember the year of the poll that he was the second most popular leader in the 20th century in the eyes of russians. this may have been eight or 10 years ago. d you still encounter little statues of him on the dash

boards of taxis or buses because stalin was strong, the soviet union was strong, and people think in retrospect, at least they had enough to eat and they could buy it and it was cheap. i'm afraid history does strange things as time passes to people's memory. some people look better as time goes by, some people look worse. stalin has sort of gone down and now come up again and will probably go down again if and when. host: here's some last little video and i want you to put this in perspective and it's of the youtube and speaks fors. -- speaks for itself. [video clip] ♪

host: what impact did he have on that country? guest: boris yeltsin was a complicated man, a difficult man, an impossible man. gorbachev in a way lifted him up to be an ally and yeltsin -- for yeltsin that wasn't enough so he turned against gorbachev, both because he wanted power and because he wanted to go farther than gorbachev was going. so they quarreled and it was a bitter mutual situation. and if they had only remained partners, in looking back, could they have triumphed in the end as partners, leaders of a democratic soviet union? and if they couldn't remain patter ins it was partly

gorbachev's fault and partly yeltsin's fault and then yeltsin became the boss, president, and he did some good things when russian television mocked him, he allowed them to do so. when the russian press mocked him, he allowed them to do so. but he also presided over what amounted to 10 years of near chaos, or at least five or six of them. and by the time he left office in 1999, russia was in bad shape and it shot it needed -- he thought he needed -- putin thought it needed putin. and so yeltsin's legacy on top of everything else is putin. he gave them putin. host: what did our leaders think of boris yeltsin? host: there's -- guest: there's a wonderful book called "the russian and" in how clinton interacted with yeltsin over the years and i found it particularly interesting

because yeltsin reminded me of khrushchev and when khrushchev behaved in ways like the ones seen, he scared the hell out of them, of kennedy. yeltsin in some ways reminded clinton of himself. and he was a man who beat them and told them to stop and had appetites.ic clinton rolled with the punches which kennedy never did. yeltsin came to washington i think in 1989 and he wouldn't

get out of the car. and it was in the white house driveway, until condee rice promised him an audience with bush, which he didn't get immediately anyway, scowcroft received him and bush dropped by. and yeltsin behaved in ways like we just saw on the tv but then yeltsin seemed to calm down and in the next encounter behaved like a statesman and bush finally decided yeltsin was the future of russia, that he'd go farther than gorbachev in democratizing russia and might be a better friend to the united states and more important of all he could hold it together whereas it was fall ago part. host: i know this is delicate, mr. gorbachev is 86 years old. when he gets to the end of his life, how do you think the russians will treat him, always the big ceremony at the end of somebody's life, compared to what the rest of the world will do? guest: i think the first thing to say is they will feel better

about him in the initial after math of his passing. they didn't like raisa, his wife. but when she died, they said some lovely things about her. so i think there will be a period of fondness and nostalgia and he'll probably get a modicum of ceremony from the government. he won't get, i think, the full honors that despite everything he deserves. host: one last question, which book was harder, the khrushchev book or the gorbachev book? guest: what you're really comparing here is a dead leader with a live leader as a subject. khrushchev was harder because there were fewer people still around who knew him. and he was no longer around to interview. host: boy, that would have been wonderful to interview khrushchev.

guest: gorbachev was around and we learned a hell of a lot from interviewing him which i hope is reflected by the book. a lot of people who worked with him is still around, but, there's this but, some of the people who worked with gorbachev were reluctant to talk about him, i suspect because he's still alive and they might have been at least partly critical of him, whereas the people who are still alive who worked with khrushchev are willing to be devastating about him because he was no longer around. so it's a mixed bag with both but i loved doing both. host: professor william taubman has been our guest, the book is "gorbachev, his life and times." we thank you very much. guest: i thank you.

>> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about q s program, visit us at anda.org and are available as c-span podcasts. >> if you enjoyed this week's q&a interview here are some other programs you might like. economist judy shelton on the economic problems that led to the collapse of the soviet union. craig shirley talks about his book on ronald reagan, last act, and same on montefiore on his book, "the romanoffs." you can search our entire library at c-span.org. next, live, your calls and comments on "washington journal." then live at 10:00 a.m. the

house meets for a pro forma session and live at noon the iranian council hold a discussion about president trump's strategy in iran and later a discussion of the executive editors of "the washington post" and "new york times" on the first amendment, the media and president trump's statements on press freedom.