The Literature Network - Gorbachev: One Leader Can Make a Difference;Soviet History's Course Changed in 1988

Gorbachev: One Leader Can Make a Difference;Soviet History's Course Changed in 1988

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 19881231
Author:David Remnick

Russia's promethean novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy spent hundreds of pages in "War and Peace" trying to refute the "great man view of history." He belittled the "vain" human notion that the decisions and inclinations of a single individual can change the course of a culture and even the world.

Tolstoy might have changed his mind had he witnessed Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.

Millions of Muscovites, though plagued in their daily lives this year by the gap between Gorbachev's proposals for reform and the increasing shortages of everything from meat to soap, know they are living at the center ...

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