When I spoke with Werner Herzog in 2019 for the Political Theater podcast, he had just released his documentary “Meeting Gorbachev,” about Mikhail Gorbachev, an elegiac look at the last president of the Soviet Union and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. A lot has changed since then.
Herzog admired Gorbachev, particularly as a politician who worked with U.S. President Ronald Reagan to de-escalate nuclear tensions and help end the Cold War. But in 2019, amid increased U.S.-Russia tensions, the topic of current Russian leader Vladimir Putin was unavoidable. Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine by force in 2014, interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections and supported Syrian President Bashaar al-Assad in that country’s civil war, among other contentious international moves.
