Pavel Stroilov is the primary source of the documents stolen from Gorbachev Funadtion’s archive, which revealed during the last years the backstage of USSR’s fall and the deals stroke by the European leaders in the '80s. In an exclusive interview for HotNews.ro, Stroilov tells about Francois Mitterand and Mihail Gorbachev’s plans to create a Socialist European Confederation, Margaret Thatcher's opposing Germany's reuinification and the Iliescu-Gorbachev complicity.

Crina Boros: Pavel, how did you manage to get secrets out of the Soviet archive from Russia?

Pavel Stroilov: The archive was huge. Nobody at Gorbachev Foundation knew what I was doing. I took the documents with me to England, when I visited a friend and it was then when I asked for a political asylum.

The reason why I had to do this so urgently was the scandal around the Romanian part of the collection. Before the last elections, President Iliescu threatened a libel lawsuit against my friend Vladimir Bukovsky, who told the press about Iliescu’s Soviet connections. This was a big political battle some five or six years ago, so we could not hold the documents any longer. With my permission, Vladimir published the most important papers on Iliescu – without naming me as the source of the documents, as I was still in Russia. Then Iliescu shut up about a lawsuit, and soon afterwards, lost the elections.

Since then, however, we’ve discovered some additional evidence about him in other parts of my collection. One transcript records an exchange between Gorbachev and the Bulgarian leader Lilov. Lilov said something like "Afterall, Iliescu is doing fine in Romania, for us." And Gorbachev said "Hush! We don’t want to advertise our closeness to Iliescu", in other words, "Yes, he’s doing fine, but we don’t want to advertise that he’s close to Moscow."

Then