He was not American but Russian, but in October 1990 he did as Mr. Marshall and passed by. Fifteen days after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, having been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany, Mikhail Gorbachev was a celebrity. The previous year he had received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation and Felipe González had tried on several occasions, without success, for the president of the Soviet Union to visit Spain.
On Friday, October 26, he arrived in Madrid. He met with the President of the Government and, accompanied by his wife, Raísa, attended the dinner offered by the King and Queen at the Royal Palace. After a Saturday full of political, business and university meetings, on the 28th he flew to Barcelona. The socialist government had proposed Seville as an alternative. Gorbachev declined. In full pre-Olympic fever, he wanted to see the project. Although, above all, he was interested in knowing the city where the first Soviet consulate and the port would soon be opened, an enclave of the first magnitude for his merchant fleet. Also because most of the Spanish-Soviet companies were of Catalan origin and he wanted to talk with some businessmen.
As in Villar del Río, in Barcelona everyone was waiting for them. The people of Barcelona received him with the cry of “Gooorbi, Gooorbi!”, but five hours did not last long. In the Olympic ring, according to what the then Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Inocencio Arias, recounted in his memoirs, Pasqual Maragall did the impossible to be photographed alone with Gorbachev, while the other protocols tried to ensure that the Soviet’s cicerone in Barcelona, ??the prince Felipe, and the Catalan president will not be relegated.
Jordi Pujol was trilling. Madrid and Moscow had not planned a visit to the Palau de la Generalitat, perhaps a brief meeting if there was time. The president, who had spent a decade collecting meetings with leaders and heads of state, had met with George Bush for seven minutes at the White House in February for a handshake and a photo. Gorbachev did not grant him a meeting alone. All the more a brief meeting, with the prince present, and with the mayor and the Minister of Defense, Narcís Serra, trying to sneak into the room. After having lunch and visiting the Museu Picasso, the delegation left for Paris.
In August 1989 Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had joined their capitals with a human chain, the Via Baltica —which years later the Catalan independence movement would copy—. Gorbachev in January 1990 had passed through Vilnius to demand that the local communist party not bet on separating from the USSR. “Lithuania’s independence is asking for the impossible,” he said short-sightedly. Gorbachev assumed that having an autonomy assimilable to that of the German Länder was enough for Catalonia. When he arrived in Barcelona, ??the Catalanist sympathy for the Baltic republics was not lost on him. In his chronicle for El País, Joan Barril shrewdly wrote, referring to Pujol: “It is already known that when one sows Vytautas, one reaps Landsbergis”, in a play on words with the name of the Lithuanian president. The president accused the socialist government of ignoring the Generalitat. The Catalanist parties joined the complaint. The Foreign Ministry shifted the responsibility to Moscow and the Soviets hid behind the tight schedule. But the story was not over.
On September 5, 1991, Pujol traveled to Moscow for a symposium on the transition of the USSR to a market system organized by the World Economic Forum. The city was upside down. The effects of the clashes during the August coup attempt were still visible. The Catalan entourage had to overcome barricades to reach the Russian White House, as explained by his press officer, Ramón Pedrós, in one of his travel books with the president. At the Parliament and Government headquarters, Pujol was photographed with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, then the fashionable man who, perched on a tank, had stopped the involutionary riot while the insurgents kept Gorbachev held and humiliated at his dacha Crimean summer.
Yeltsin thus returned the favor to Pujol, who a year and a half earlier had arranged for him to undergo surgery for a herniated disc during a visit to Barcelona. The Russian was suspicious of what the enemy anesthetics in his country’s hospitals might bring him. The Catalan leader, mischievous, insisted that he convey to Gorbachev his greetings and the congratulations of the Catalans for overcoming the coup.
The next day the independence of the Baltic republics was recognized, three days later the dissolution of the USSR was signed. The promoter of glasnost and perestroika passed into history and, gradually, to ostracism in his own country. Upon his return, Pujol compared Catalonia with Lithuania. In his memoirs he included his meeting with Yeltsin and he forgot Gorbachev’s Berlango dribble to the Generalitat.
