True. But I suspect Gorbachev was still more than an apparatchik marching to a new central committee tune. If not for anything else, for those of us on the other side of the imperial curtain, he was the flesh behind “glasnost” and “perestroika”. I am curious: what part did he (as opposed to Yeltsin) have to play in handing over the country to IMF-style manipulators and oligarchs? I have assumed that Gorbachev having been ousted shortly after the Soviet Union crumbled, most of the blame for what followed rests with Yeltsin… but that’s just an assumption.
—ravi