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A&E Networks

"Mikhail Sergeyevich, please allow me to explain myself," says Werner Herzog. "I am a German, and the first German that you probably met wanted to kill you." So begins Herzog's affecting documentary about Mikhail Gorbachev, built chiefly around three conversations with the former leader of the Soviet Union—a once-titanic figure who, at age 87, Herzog now describes as "a deeply lonesome man."

Particularly given America's current relations with Russia, Meeting Gorbachev feels disarmingly affectionate—"Everything about Gorbachev was genuine," Herzog reflects—but the director never loses his usual clear-eyed gaze. ("Here, his home village as it looks today," Herzog narrates over drone footage of a dour rural town. "It is hard to imagine that from such a god-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere, one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century emerged.") Meeting Gorbachev also offers plenty of historical context, examining events that shaped not only the Soviet Union, but the world: Chernobyl, nuclear disarmament, perestroika and glasnost, an attempted coup, the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. (Since this is a Herzog film, there's also a sequence in which the director tells viewers how to kill garden slugs with open jars of beer. "This would attract the slugs, lovers of beer," Herzog says, "and if you were lucky, you might trap quite a number of them, up to 70 or 80.")

Largely sticking to Gorbachev's accomplishments—and his belief in the benefits of governments operating, if not side-by-side, at least in concert with each other—these men largely avoid discussing the present. Some statements, though, groan under the weight of contemporary relevance: "People who don't understand the importance of cooperation and disarmament should quit politics. There should be no place for such people in politics," says Gorbachev. "But they're very much there."