Moscow, Nov 22 (CTK) – Czech President Milos Zeman met last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on Wednesday during his five-day official visit to Russia, his spokesman Jiri Ovcacek said.
Ovcacek released photos of the two politicians from the meeting on Twitter.
Zeman was to meet Gorbachev, 86, already in September 2016, but the former Soviet leader did not arrive due to health reasons. Gorbachev was to participate at a Prague conference on security in Europe, but sent a video message to it in which he pointed out the steep deterioration of the relations of Russia and the West. He said he was sorry to see the economic contacts which were built for decades being torn and a dialogue being replaced by sanctions.
Gorbachev was in the leadership of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and he was the first and last Soviet president in 1990-91, too, before the union was dissolved.
He introduced reforms after he became the Communist Party’s top official in 1985, which were to revive the Soviet empire, but the contrary happened, the Soviet Union broke up and the Communist system collapsed. However, the changes he started helped democratic changes in the former Communist bloc of countries. In 1991, Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize.
