We won't survive if someone loses their nerves in the current tension. - Mikhail Gorbachev

You have to consider that Reagan was twenty years older than I was. He was the age of my mother. So there was a generation gap. During one of our talks, he tried to lecture me and moralize. I said to him, "Mr. President, you are not my teacher, and I am not your student. You are not a prosecutor, and I am not a defendant. So let's not subject each other to lectures. Let's talk frankly and address the issues. If you want to lecture, we might as well wrap it up, because there's really nothing to talk about." He got a little upset. Not long after that, he said, "Why don't we go on a first-name basis? You call me Ron and I'll call you Mikhail." That was an important step.

The day after I announced that I was stepping down, I was scheduled to come to the Kremlin for an interview with a Japanese reporter. I got a call beforehand from one of my assistants, who said that Yeltsin was in my office with his entourage, finishing off a bottle of whiskey. These people were almost like savages, celebrating their big victory over a bottle in my office. I told myself: That office has been desecrated. I will never set foot in that room again.

It is time to consign to oblivion the cold war postulates when Europe was viewed as an arena of confrontation divided into "spheres of influence" and someone else's "forward-based defences", as an object of military confrontation — namely a theatre of war.