When I shook Gorbachev’s hand

It was Wednesday 17th July 1991. Russia — and Communism — had preoccupied me for the last fifteen years. A year earlier I’d published In the Communist Mirror. Now with the East Bloc already transformed, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was coming to London.

With British Prime Minister John Major, hosting a meeting of the G7 countries

I’m not sure I planned it, but I had tickets that night for Rossini’s lovely frothy opera La Cenerentola at the Royal Opera House. My budget ran to two seats in the gods, right up under the roof, at the back of the auditorium. At six thirty pm, just before the curtain went up, a small party of distinguished guests entered the Royal Box. The guests of honour were Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev. The whole house — over 2,000 people — went wild. We were stamping and weeping, revelling in the chance to salute a great man. The roar only died to a hush when the performance began. I was listening, but also remembering those egregious Soviet displays of fake democracy western journalists called ‘rentacrowd’. The Gorbachevs must have realised this was the real thing. London greeted them with an eruption of pure joy.

Rossini notwithstanding, all through the first act I was hatching a plot.

It was just a hunch, but as the interval curtain fell I grabbed my daughter’s hand and, just before people started spilling out for drinks we dashed down the back stairs. The cheap seats had a separate entrance in those days, six flights of naked concrete. There was a fire door, but if you pressed the iron bar you found yourself in Floral Street. And there standing in the middle of that Covent Garden side street, in Central London, stood the Gorbachevs, hand in hand and entirely alone.

A good Russia had been my project for years. I believed in it. The rest is a blur. The Gorbachevs saw us, a youngish mother and her ten-year-old daughter, and we met. Raisa smiled with faint puzzlement while her husband gave me his huge warm hand.

During their 1984 visit to London

I wasn’t there as a pundit, not even as a writer. But it seemed to me, as a student of Russian literature, and Russian philosophy, but above all as a journalist who had lived in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, that here at last was a decent man who would deliver a better country.

I spoke very passable Russian in those days, but all I could do was splutter. ‘Pozdravlyayu!’ I said. ‘Congratulations!’ Raisa extended her curious smile. ‘Vam vsego dobrogo!’ ‘All the best to you.’

And then a few more people appeared — none of them, it seemed to me, security, unless there were marksmen on the roof — and that wonderful couple moved on.

I read in a news report the following day that they only stayed for the first act. That Prime Minister John Major and his wife Norma whisked them off for talks and dinner soon after.

So it was almost as if my strange meeting — a blessing on my career — didn’t happen. But it did. An emotional landmark.

Published in 1990. A much later title, Motherland, was orginally called ‘The Good Man in Russia’.