W. Michael Reisman is unsurpassed among living international lawyers. His intelligence is acute; his legal imagination, fertile; he writes with insight, force and flair; he speaks easily, logically and convincingly; and the scale, variety, quality and profundity of the cascade of his publications is extraordinary. His concern with advancing an international law of human dignity, in the tradition of his own teachers, Myres S. McDougal and Harold D. Lasswell, is unflagging. Over the decades he has taught much of the elite of the profession, and his devotion to his students has been returned by their devotion to him. His contributions to the development of international law have not been confined to teaching and scholarship. He is an active and sought-after counselor, expert and arbitrator. Having sat with him on more than one arbitral tribunal, and having enjoyed hearing his arguments in others, the writer can attest to his quite exceptional authority. It is a privilege to join with his other friends and admirers in contributing to this volume.

My topic is a remarkable article by a remarkable man, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the former General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of what was, at the time of the article's publication, the Soviet Union. The Soviet press published Gorbachev's article on September 17, 1987, and the next day it was circulated as a UN document.