This is CBS I on the World. I'm John Baxter speaking with Professor Michael McFaul, former ambassador to the, at one time, Russian Federation, at one time the Soviet Union. They're both Russia. So I can slip in my language because I'm a little older and I grew up under the Soviet version of Russia.

Right.

We now have the Federation version of Russia.

It's 1990-91, and a young graduate student named Michael McFaw is in Moscow,

while the whole world is watching an experiment by a man named Mikhail Gorbachev,

who inherits the big boss role of the Soviet Communist Party because of the deaths of three

very aged and very unchanging men. They're gone. Gorbachev is in charge and he's got ideas, Glasnose and

Parastroika. That translates into reaching out to the United States. There's a background of this.

And before we plunge into what happened in Moscow in 1990, 91, Michael DeTont, 1972, Richard Nixon, and Leonid Brezhnev.

Is that now considered a success when you reflect upon dealing with autocrats?

That's a great question.

I think it's a very contested debate in my world. Some people blame that period for prolonging the Soviet Union. I don't. I think it was a successful policy at the time to advance American national interests. And I always like to emphasize that. Your job when you work for

the United States of America in the U.S. government is to advance our national interest, our security,

our prosperity, our values, not other countries. And I think that was a wise strategy at the time.

I think there's some lessons from that period for how to deal with the

Chinese today. Maybe we went a little too far, in my view, in not speaking about human rights

issues during that period. That was kind of off the table. I think you can do both. I kind of like

the way the Reagan folks did it later. But I think it was a useful time in stabilizing relations between two superpowers

and lessening the probability of a war between two nuclear powers.

The joke I've always enjoyed at the moment, there's so many, is when Brezhnev gives a tour of his cars that some of the vehicles came from Richard Nixon's presence to Brezhnaf, who loved to drive them.

Showed him to his mother at the Kremlin.

This is a joke.

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