Postwar

287

In fact Gorbachev’s own family had suffered greatly under Stalin: both of his grandfathers were imprisoned or exiled in the course of the dictator’s purges. But the new Soviet leader did not even acknowledged the fact until November 1990.

288

‘Mais c’est quoi, la dialectique?’ ‘C’est l’art et la maniere de toujours retomber sur ses pattes, mon vieux!’ Jorge Semprun, Quel Beau Dimanche (Paris: Grasset, 1980), p. 100.

289

This was the subject of a book by Zhores Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, published in exile in 1979.

290

In an opinion poll taken some months later, in January 1990, Gorbachev ranked just after Peter The Great in public favour—but far behind both Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin…

291

It was Sakharov who forced the issue into the open by demanding—on live television—the abrogation of Article Six and the return to the peoples’ representatives of the power ‘stolen’ by the Party in 1918. Gorbachev himself finally switched off Sakharov’s microphone, but too late.

292

He also made a point, at Chernenko’s funeral in March 1985, of meeting and greeting Alessandro Natta, the head of the Italian Communist Party, until then perennially in Moscow’s bad graces.

293

In an ironically apposite echo of the American fiasco in Vietnam, the puppet regime in Kabul—now bereft of armed support from abroad—limped on until 1992 before succumbing (its international guarantors notwithstanding) to the forces of the Taliban.

294

Andrei Grachev, quoted in Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford, 1997), p.88.

295

In 1986 the US lifted its veto on Polish membership of the IMF, in return for the release of all remaining political prisoners and a general amnesty.

296

See Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods (IMF + Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 567.

297

Officially the site of Nagy’s grave had remained unknown for thirty years; in fact its location, in an obscure and unmarked corner of the Budapest Municipal Cemetery, was public knowledge.

298

I am grateful to Professor Timothy Garton Ash for this reference.

299

It appears that Honecker had calculated, reasonably enough, that Gorbachev would not last and could safely be ignored.

300

Three days after Gorbachev’s visit Honecker received a visiting Chinese dignitary and compared the unrest in the GDR with China’s recent ‘counter-revolution’. It seems likely that he was at least contemplating a German re- play of the Tiananmen Square massacre—one reason why his colleagues took the decision to oust him.