When Mikhail Gorbachev sings, he sings in Ukrainian. This is a respite from his conversations with Vitaly Mansky, which are pricklier and more uneven than those of a year earlier, in 2018, when he filmed Meeting Gorbachev with Werner Herzog. Herzog had assumed a deferential position. Sitting across from the former Soviet leader, both of them bathed in bright, warm tones, Herzog told Gorbachev that he loves him. In Mansky's film, meanwhile, Alexandra Ivanova's camera first wanders through the darkness that reigns in Gorbachev's large, lonely estate––then finds the retired statesman slumped, asleep before a computer screen that plays videos of speeches in his honor. The cuckoo call of a mechanical clock jolts him awake, and then the film, cheekily, tells us its title: Gorbachev. Heaven.
The heaven in question is from the Ukrainian folk song that Gorbachev's mother used to sing to him. “I was in heaven,” Gorbachev quips in the middle of Mansky's documentary, recalling his early career in Stavropol, “and I ended up in hell.” Ultimately, both Gorbachev documentarians want to know whether Gorbachev himself thinks he is a tragic figure. Herzog consoled (us?) with extensive discussion of the man's achievements: the end of the Cold War, nuclear disarmament, the popularity he achieved in the west. Mansky, by contrast, demands answers from him on hard binaries: is democracy organic to Russian society, or an artificial imposition on it? “Either you are for the Baltics acquiring freedom or you are for preserving the USSR!” he insists to the recalcitrant Gorbachev.
There are few consolations, and even less light and hope in Mansky's documentary. Peppering their repartee about democracy are still shots of the security perimeter of two tall fences and surveillance cameras around the estate, and indoor scenes (shrouded, as ever, in darkness) of the time capsule in which Gorbachev lives: four rotary phones on the desk, many photographs and paintings of Raisa Gorbacheva next to dried flowers, the table settings, and heavy curtains evoking dusty 1970s luxe.
“Most of all I suffer from changes in the weather, especially the solar storms”—this is the first insight that Gorbachev offers Mansky, as the darkness focuses our gaze on the angelic white fuzz on the elder statesman's head. A typical remark for someone of his generation. Indeed, the camera is fascinated by his obsolescence. With his large, sad face taking up most of the screen at many points in the film, we see up-close his resistance to Mansky's line of questioning. We wait as he attempts several times to get up from a deep sofa chair, as he slowly lifts his leg getting into a car, as he rides in a slow-moving elevator (gifted by friends who learned that it takes him an hour to get from the living room to his bedroom on the second floor). “What is happening here?” we see Gorbachev looking down in apprehension, noticing a fine latticework of veins suddenly emerged on his arm.
Against Gorbachev's insistence to his interviewer that he is a socialist, that freedom is coming, and that hope is still relevant, the film chooses a decidedly different angle, casting his hopes as hopelessly out of date. While eulogizing the recently-deceased statesman, it proposes an ominous picture of the present: Putin seems to be on TV everywhere, positioned behind the unwitting Gorbachev. At the same time, the film creates a motif of associating Gorbachev's imaginary of Ukraine with heaven––not only through the folk song he sings, but also through his warmest recollections of his Ukrainian mother and her family, and of his Ukrainian wife. Gorbachev was a leader who believed his regime was so enticing to its non-Russian subjects that they would have gladly remained in the Soviet Union if it were not for their corrupt leaders. His imperial fantasies ring differently now, as we watch Russia’s genocidal invasion.
