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, declaring his office extinct. State television later showed pictures of the Kremlin as the Soviet red flag with its hammer and sickle was lowered to be replaced by the red, white and blue banner of Russia.
Diplomats gave dramatic accounts of hasty farewell visits to the Kremlin, where officials were busy clearing desks and consigning the old regime to the archives or the shredders. But for the most part one sensed people were not fully aware of the drama of the situation. This was no great revolution, no storming of the palace.