Tuesday 30 July 2019

NZIFF Film Review: "Meeting Gorbachev" (2018).


"A film by Werner Herzog and André Singer." This is Meeting Gorbachev. This biographical documentary film directed by Herzog and Singer about the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. The film consists of interviews between Herzog and Gorbachev, conducted over the span of six months.

On 2 March, 1931, the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union was born to a poor peasant family, of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, in the village of Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, under the rule of Joseph Stalin. In his youth, he, along with his father, operated combine harvesters on a collective farm. Like his grandfather and father, he later joined the Communist Party. He was later emitted into Moscow State University, where he was studying law. During this time, he met and married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953. In 1955, he graduated and received his law degree. He moved back to Stavropol, where he worked for the Komsomol youth organisation and became a keen proponent of the de-Stalinization reforms of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, in which he oversaw construction of the Great Stavropol Canal. In 1978, he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central Committee and, in 1979, joined its governing Politburo. After the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as General Secretary, the de facto head of government, in 1985.

Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and to its socialist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform was necessary, particularly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. These reforms included the withdrawl of the Soviet army from the Soviet–Afghan War, nuclear purification and ending the Cold War. Domestically, his policy of glasnost ("openness") allowed for enhanced freedom of speech and press, while his perestroika ("restructuring") sought to decentralise economic decision making to improve efficiency. His democratisation measures and formation of the elected Congress of People's Deputies undermined the one-party state. Gorbachev declined to intervene militarily when various Eastern Bloc countries abandoned Marxist-Leninist governance in 1989–90. Internally, growing nationalist sentiment threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading Marxist-Leninist hardliners to launch the unsuccessful August Coup against Gorbachev. In the wake of this, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes and he resigned in December. Widely considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century, Gorbachev remains the subject of controversy. The recipient of a wide range of awards—including the Nobel Peace Prize—he was widely praised for his pivotal role in ending the Cold War, curtailing human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist–Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the reunification of Germany. Conversely, in Russia he is often derided for not stopping the Soviet collapse, an event which brought a decline in Russia's global influence and precipitated an economic crisis.

Whatever your opinion of the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union is, Herzog has once again found a fascinating subject with Meeting Gorbachev.

Simon says Meeting Gorbachev receives:



Also, see my reviews for Into the Inferno and Long Day's Journey into Night (地球最後的夜晚).

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