| Baseball, Aggies and award for Gorbachev but no hot dogs 04/13/2001 Associated Press COLLEGE STATION, Texas – Getting a taste of Texas, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took in a high school baseball game, spoke to students at Texas A&M University and picked up an award from fellow elder statesman George Bush.
Baseball and A&M got the traditional Aggie thumbs up Thursday.
Hot dogs at the game, though, got "Nyet" as both he and the former president, whose presidential library is at Texas A&M, donned baseball caps but spurned an offer of the traditional American food while camped in the bleachers of the game after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch.
Defending his past, ripping his immediate successor and embracing new Russian president Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev later told about 2,500 people, some of them paying $35 to hear his lecture, that any of his thoughts about Putin, whom he has consulted, would be cautious.
"It's too early to tell," he said. "I don't want to go to any kind of extreme. I don't want to be openly emotional, overly critical."
That wasn't his attitude toward Boris Yeltsin, who took over Russia after Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union.
"Yeltsin's era moved Russia into the category of a backward country, an underdeveloped country," Gorbachev said. "It made Russia poor. We paid a huge price for the projects imposed by Yeltsin."
In a history lesson as part of his 75-minute address, he said Lenin's supporters betrayed the communist idealogue's philosophies and Stalin's ruthlessness severely hurt the Russian people.
As a contrast, he defined his policies that led to the end of the Soviet Union as "gradual change without bloodshed, (giving) people a chance (and) the oxygen of freedom.
"That's what makes that period particularly humane," he said.
Bush told students at the Bush School of Government at A&M that Gorbachev was a man who ensured a peaceful world for them, saying the former Soviet leader "did more to guarantee that you guys would be living in a world of peace for the next 25 years, or 50 years, or whatever."
"He stuck his neck out and he changed the political agenda throughout the entire world."
Gorbachev, responding to questions from students, predicted a "stable, multifaceted relationship" between Putin and Bush's son, President George W. Bush.
"I think that President George W. Bush – 43rd – will have a very productive, substantive partner in President Putin," he said, using the terminology Bush uses – No. 43 – to describe his son.
"Americans like numbers," Gorbachev chuckled later.
After dining on filet mignon in the Bush Library rotunda Thursday night, Gorbachev accepted from the former president the George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service. The Bush Presidential Library Foundation is sponsor of the award, a polished crystal prism with an engraved globe.
"Today there are hundreds of millions of people who breathe free air thanks in no small measure to our honoree," Bush said. "There are hundreds of millions of people who no longer have to worry about armed conflict between two ideological rivals."
"Thanks to the joint efforts of the leaders of our two countries we built the trust that must be preserved," Gorbachev responded. "This is our message to the new generation of leaders."
Gorbachev was lauded by the West as the man who helped free Eastern Europe from Communism. His stardom in the Soviet Union tumbled, however, with the perception held by many that he allowed the once-mighty superpower to crumble. In 1995, he captured only 1 percent of the presidential vote in Russia.
The ascension of Putin to the top job and his embracing of Gorbachev, however, has allowed the now 70-year-old former leader to recover some of his luster at home.
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