P O L I T I C S
Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, The Human Factor, is the winner of the 2021 Pushkin House Prize. Editor’s note: This interview, by Andrew Jack, was first published on the Pushkin House website.
What explains your interest in Russia?
What drew you to studying Gorbachev? I’ve been studying political leadership for a very long time and followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s career especially closely. I got a head start 42 years ago in a conversation I had with Zdenĕk Mlynář, the main author of the radically reformist 1968 Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia whom I had first met in Prague in 1965. When Mlynář, who was in political exile, spent a month in Oxford in June 1979, I learned from him that he had been a close friend of Gorbachev when they studied together in the Law Faculty of Moscow State University. I asked whether he thought Gorbachev had an open mind. His response was that this youngest member of the top Soviet leadership team was “openminded, intelligent, and anti-Stalinist.” So, I took a special interest in Gorbachev from that time on. Because of my good relations with Mlynář, who didn’t go public on his friendship with a rising Soviet politician until Gorbachev had become Soviet leader in 1985, I was aware earlier than others that he was likely to be a reform-minded General Secretary, a position that, from late 1980 onwards, I increasingly believed he would attain.
FIVE MINUTES WITH ARCHIE BROWN
It came about by pure chance. I was in my final year at LSE doing a broad social science degree, specializing in politics (in particular) and economics. I wanted to write an essay on Soviet politics so that I’d be able to answer a question on it in the Comparative Government exam paper. My tutor, a specialist on British politics, said he was not qualified to judge it, so he gave it to Leonard Schapiro, the author of a major book on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He liked my essay and encouraged me to apply for a graduate studentship in Russian political studies. I had to start learning Russian from scratch aged 24. It wasn’t because I had a fascination with Russia at that time and I was certainly never attracted to Communism, but I became keenly interested and don’t regret the path my career took.
Winner of the 2021 Pushkin House Book Prize
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