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Timothy Snyder on How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Took America by Surprise
In the language of physics, a bell that hangs on a post on a farm is in equilibrium: the force of gravity pulling it down is matched by the force of the ground pushing back on the structure. Gettin…
I don’t think I managed to get much of this across in Moscow: the huge meeting room turned all utterances into echoes; men in scarves shivered during the presentations; the secondhand cigarette smoke was uncannily warmer than the air. In Moscow, American conference participants saw the opera Mazepa, about the Ukrainian hetman and his break with Tsar Peter; during the intermission, the economists in the group asked the Russia hands whether Ukraine was a separate country. A Russian friend awakened me with a telephone call: “Massive revolution!” He meant the coup attempt against Gorbachev that would be the beginning of the end of the USSR.
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