L’ultimo leader dell’URSS ha tentato di modernizzare e riformare il suo paese, anche se non riusciva a immaginarlo come nient’altro che un impero, sul New Yorker un articolo di Masha Gessen.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow, on Tuesday, at the age of ninety-one. In the last two decades of his life, he rarely granted interviews. So, in 2010, when he agreed to speak to someone from a Moscow magazine that I edited, I felt both awe and some misgivings: here was a unique opportunity that would almost certainly be wasted.