A jeho vlastní vzpomínky: "I actually proposed Gorbachev to fill that post. He was, at that time, the First Secretary of the Stavropol Region Party Committee. Even Mikhail Andrievich Suslov, who was in charge of propaganda and was really de facto the Number 1 man on the Politburo (de jure, he was Number 2), he actually did issue an invitation to Gorbachev to come to Moscow and help the department. What struck me at that time is that he turned it down. He had enough brain to say no.
Later on I arranged for him to come and visit Canada several times. I wanted very much for the man who was responsible for agriculture in Russia to visit Canada. Actually he had conveyed through a mutual friend of ours that he was ready to come to Canada as long as I would be the one to organize his trip. He didn't want to have anything to do with the organization of the trip. So I began terrorizing the Central Committee with my diplomatic cables demanding Gorbachev's visit. And Andropov ultimately said OK. It was a very useful visit for Gorbachev. What struck me is the kind of detailed interest and care Gorbachev took in the farmer economy, and that really struck me very positively and very much.
At first we kind of sniffed around each other and our conversations didn't touch on serious issues. And then, verily, history plays tricks on one, we had a lot of time together as guests of the Minister of Agriculture in Canada who, himself, was too late for the reception because he was stuck with some striking farmers somewhere. So we took a long walk on that Minister's farm and, as it often happens, both of us suddenly were just kind of flooded and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So it was at that time, during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were knocked together, that we poured it all out and during that three-hour conversation we actually came to agreement on all our main points. He left, and literally two weeks later I received an invitation from the Academy of Sciences to take the post of the head of the Academy of Sciences Institute of International Relations and the World Economy. I had a good-bye dinner and I went back to Russia." (zdůrazněno mnou)
