Berlin, 3 October 2009
President Tadić's speech at the Quadriga award

Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the course of history rare are the leaders with whom words about change and liberation are associated. Such is the case of the man whom I am asked to honor today. Perestroika! Glasnost! Gorbačov!

These two words and one man will be forever united with each other in history and in our memories. And deservedly so!

In those uncertain days of the 1980’s, we still lived in a world where we wondered whether a deep confrontation – separating peoples who ought to find common ground – would be a permanent condition.

We then started to hear these words. We saw actions and decisions that suggested something momentous and different to previous moments of hope. Expression was not stifled. Political spring was allowed to become summer – not another winter.

Today, we have gathered to recognize the man who held the political tiller of the then Soviet Union.

We recognize the man who saw fit to unleash forces that would slowly regenerate his own country and give freedom to many other nations to express themselves.

We recognize the man who found an accommodation with other leaders and gave to us all the belief that confrontation in a nuclear age could be overcome.

These, Ladies and Gentlemen, are not simply events that will one day be footnotes in history books. They are history!

Unfortunately, when leaders of my country at the time – Yugoslavia – were confronted by same choices, they made decisions that led us into a deep, dark valley from which I believe we are only now emerging.

I know that our test of leadership today is to rebuild a society that plunged into the abyss of war and to bring Serbia into European Union.

Mihail Gorbačov can look back and with no small satisfaction – and to our immense gratitude – say that, when tested, he confronted those challenges of leadership, steering his nation and so many others to a future that gave freedom, hope and the prospect that peace, not war, was the real option. They are few in history about whom this can be said.

Today challenge we all face is to ensure that collectively we weave a new fabric in which Russia, its neighbors, Europe and the world achieve a relationship in which we see each other and act - not with hostility or suspicion – but as architects of a common endeavour for the security and prosperity of the generations to come.

The fact that I – and I believe all of us gathered here – can think this way about our humanity is due to the wisdom, courage and vision of Mihail Gorbačov.

Thank you.