Of course, the communications machine goes into overdrive, whipping up interest from the press, organising the show itself and so on. But for the WebCom team, this is first and foremost our annual rendezvous with celebrity culture. The Energy Globe people must have connections because they get seriously big names along to their show. Glitz was provided this year by Canadian singer Alanis Morrissette (who sang her new single), Italian pop star Zucchero (whose after-show concert blew away a few cobwebs), music legend Dionne Warwick, a real American diva, and Bollywood star Aamir Khan, in terms of numbers of fans in the world probably the biggest celeb of the night, as well as being one who made a lasting impression on some of my female colleagues.

Political gravitas was not missing either among the guests, with Kofi Annan in attendance, along with former Indian environment minister (and famously named) Maneka Gandhi, who chaired the jury, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the team, we share out the celebs between us for the purpose of interviews. There was some jockeying for who gets whom, of course, but one assignment was clear from the start. There are two Russian speakers on the team, my Latvian colleague and me, so we got the Gorbachev job.

In the western half of Europe, there’s no question that Gorby (as they say) is a star, a hero of the eighties, the man who ended the Cold War and freed the world from communism and at least temporarily “ended history”. For people like me and my colleague, who grew up when our countries were still part of the Soviet Union, things are perhaps a little more nuanced… This was the last leader of the empire which had absorbed our countries, the figurehead of the system which had forcibly schooled us to be good Marxist-Leninists and a man who, for all the change he brought about, believed both in communism and the USSR. Still, I was fascinated to meet him and get my own impression of such a huge historical figure first hand, even if I would not be able to ask the question I would really have liked to ask – was it him who sent the tanks into Vilnius in January 1991?

Seeing Gorbachev close up mixed impressions of the surprising and the familiar. He’s aged obviously, and is in many ways surprisingly ordinary-looking, the quintessential elderly small round man. But then there’s that famous birthmark. It’s an icon, seen on a thousand TV news programmes from the eighties, evocative of an entire era of world politics and historic change. I couldn’t help thinking about how improbable it would once have seemed that I, as a junior Soviet citizen from the periphery of the empire, would one day be sitting in Brussels waiting to interview this man.

Getting the great man into a room for the interview was itself no mean feat. The press pack were in a scrum, officially denominated a queue, at the door and Gorbachev himself did not seem over enthusiastic at the prospect of probable hours in their company. Indeed, to be honest, he seemed downright grumpy about the whole thing, irritated by the TV lights, annoyed by having to work through interpreters, generally disturbed by all the kafuffle. We had host privileges, and were second only to Energy Globe’s own TV team, who seemed to take an age over their interview, with Gorbachev growing visibly more frustrated and curmudgeonly by the minute.

So when it came round to us, we were ourselves in a state of trepidation, not improved by not-very-restrained mutterings from the assembled journos outside the door about being kept waiting by the organisers of the show. We needn’t have worried. It was the Russian that did it. Halfway through the first sentence he was smiling, leaning forward, delighted to speak his own language and tell a couple of Baltic kids what he thought about the next generation of world politicians who had blown the legacy of his. After the politically correct discourse we so often hear in our work, it was refreshing to hear him having a go, and revel in the re-emergence of Russia after what he called the “doormat” years of the Yeltsin era. Just as unexpectedly, he joshed us about our slightly rusty Russian and even – a bit flirtatiously? – suggested to my colleague that she should address the issue by getting herself a Russian boyfriend.

Then it was over, we were out, the scrum were in. It was something to meet Gorbachev, and even if I didn’t get to ask about the tanks in Vilnius, it’s something to tell the grandkids, isn’t it?

You can read our interview here.

Links:

Feature on Energy Globe Awards: including all interviews

EP Website latest news page

Energy Globe website

Gorbachev Foundation website – Energy Globe entry