Document No. 30: Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev regarding a Meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, October 28, 1988

This remarkable diary entry by Chernyaev gives his impressions of Gorbachev’s meeting with Kohl, little more than a month before the seminal U.N. speech. Kohl’s trip to Moscow marks a distinct warming of German-Soviet relations after the chill of the early 1980s, and in particular the establishment of a candid personal relationship between the two leaders. (Kohl would later become the direct intermediary between Gorbachev and Bush in 1989).

At the political level, these notes provide more ev...