● IN 1987 I FLEW TO MOSCOW with a couple of colleagues to report on life for young people in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were roaring ahead. The Cold War was thawing and even Margaret Thatcher had declared that she liked the Soviet leader.
Moscow was a revelation: the imposing grandeur of Red Square, the pristine metro stations bedecked in marble and bas-reliefs, the confident Soviet iconography, all these gave the sense that this was the epicentre of a powerful, global empire.
But there were other signs as well. The shoddy apartment blocks made from concrete slabs; dark, narrow roads pitted with potholes, empty shelves in the underlit gloomy shops, perhaps most of all, as Russians explained, an endemic, slothful corruption that had…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2022