Twenty-five years ago this week I went to Moscow for Christmas. What was intended as a short visit to my family, who were living there at the time, ended up as a memorable trip in which I flew into the Soviet Union and a few days later flew out of the Russian Federation. In the intervening time an empire — the first avowedly communist state on earth, a superpower in a bipolar world of cold war antagonism — had expired.
That the empire was decaying had been plain to see for years, even to those who were in charge and had tried in vain to reform the system. Its final years were marked by increasing turmoil: the loss of territories, bungled coup attempts, growing economic hardship. Yet the end itself seemed almost bathetic. On Christmas Day — by the western, not Orthodox, calendar — Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, resigned