On the evening of Christmas Day 20 years ago, my wife and kids went to Moscow’s Red Square to round out a day of holiday cheer. I had to stay in The Times’s office because Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned that morning and was making a televised address in the evening.
It was indisputably a defining moment in the 20th century, the end of a utopian experiment of mind-boggling ambition that, in the name of creating a perfect society, ended up butchering 10 million people and repressing the rest, along with half of Europe.
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