Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday, at 91, is both credited and reviled for the dismantling of the U.S.S.R. But he never set out to change the world in that way.
, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow, on Tuesday, at the age of ninety-one. In the last two decades of his life, he rarely granted interviews. So, in 2010, when he agreed to speak to someone from a Moscow magazine that I edited, I felt both awe and some misgivings: here was a unique opportunity that would almost certainly be wasted. Gorbachev was a notoriously terrible interviewee. He rambled; he went off on tangents; he almost never finished a sentence.
—produced an unprecedented explosion of writing, publishing, filmmaking, performance, and music. Obscure journals that published long, quasi-academic articles saw their press runs soar. People lined up to read the new issues of papers such as the Moscow. The reason, more often than not, was that the journal, the newspaper, and the playwright tackled the previously censored topic of Stalinist terror.
In 1989, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union released its grip on its European satellites—the countries that Moscow had effectively ruled since the end of the Second World War. One after another, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and others brought down their pro-Soviet governments. But, when Russia’s internal colonies—the countries that had been forcibly subsumed by the Soviet Union rather than simply dominated by it—reached for independence, Moscow reacted with violence.
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