BLUES FOR GORBACHEV

A Whiff of Freedom Back in the U.S.S.R.

I have been thinking about the death of Mikhail Gorbachev on August 30, 2022, at age 91. Gorbachev was the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and from most angles, its most humane. He ruled for only a short time: he took power in 1985, and left in 1991. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 under his watch, and the USSR dissolved in 1991 when many of its satellite states outside the massive borders of Russia declared their independence of the rulers in Moscow.

Others ineffectively or nominally ruled briefly (Boris Yeltsin, Dmitri Medvedev), but since Gorbachev, the singular power has been former KGB official Vladimir Putin, who in a 2005 address to parliament called the dissolution of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." The invasion of Ukraine is the most extreme example of Putin's obsession with undoing that "catastrophe."

In 1987, I had the good fortune to spend nearly three weeks in Gorbachev's Russia, covering the Billy Joel to…