When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the mantle of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, a palpable change was felt in the air, from Novosibirsk to East Berlin. Words like glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) began to replace the gradually outmoded Leninist philosophies that had become warped under Stalin and Andropov. The possibilities were palpable, and soon manifested into thousands of Muscovites calling for Gorbachev to resign in 1990, following the latter half of the decade teeming with what David Remnick aptly described for the New Yorker as “argument, truth-telling, irony, hysteria, and scandal” on state television. Read more »
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