Finishing Lenin’s Tomb (#64). Poor Gorby in disgrace. By the early 90s I was in grad school and not paying attention to global affairs, so much of the final chapter was news to me.
For some reason, the vandal who highlighted a few words in an early chapter also selected 10 or 12 lines on pages 526-527, how delightful.
On the second-to-last page, the author asks Yakovlev about how Gorbachev became Party general secretary so easily in 1985, with his plans for reform and all. Yakovlev’s reply:
“This was really a question of the inertia of the Communist Party. Every new general secretary got carte blanche at the beginning. A new man came to the fore and he was supported. You know, let him talk about innovations, about something new, it has to be tolerated, and then he will calm down and everything will go back to normal. Let him talk about democracy and pluralism, but sooner or later we’ll all be back together harnessed to the same horsecart. This happened with every newcomer: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov. The same destiny was expected of Gorbachev.”