The World

Gorbachev also summoned a strapping, ebullient reformer from the Urals to be Moscow Party secretary: Boris Yeltsin. Both men were fifty-four, both the children of parents arrested by Stalin, both hard-driving, proud and vain, both craved the limelight, both had climbed the Communist Party and been appointed regional leaders by Brezhnev, yet they were opposites. Almost teetotal, Gorbachev was austere, sometimes verbose and pompous, Yeltsin was wild, obsessive, social, exuberant – and an alcoholic. Gorbachev was a literature student married to an outspoken student of philosophy, Yeltsin was an athletic engineer, a volleyball and tennis player, married to a self-effacing engineer. Yeltsin was moreover a born leader, but also impulsive, volatile, unstable and (often) inebriated, a man of appetites on a Russian scale. As a child, he had blown off some fingers playing with a grenade; now he did the same in Gorbachev’s Politburo.

Almost immediately, Gorbachev’s glasnost

was challenged. On 26 April 1986, the core in No. 4 nuclear reactor at Chernobyl melted down and exploded. The catastrophe was a symbol of imminent Soviet decay – just as America reached its apogee as the unipower and its technology changed the way families everywhere lived and thought.

 

 

* They were aided by contingents from allies: Castro sent 4,000 Cubans to aid the Syrians; Bhutto sent a squadron of Pakistani fighter jets, one of which shot down an Israeli plane.

* Qaddafi proposed a pan-Arabist merger with Egypt. Rich on oil revenues, he backed Palestinian and anti-western radicals, buying arms from Moscow. ‘Qaddafi’s just a boy … they have no idea about Lenin or socialism,’ said Brezhnev to Castro. ‘What they do have is a lot of money. Simultaneously he’s a fanatical Muslim.’ ‘My impression,’ replied Castro, ‘is that he’s crazy.’ Inflating himself in a cult of personality, preaching his own Marxist–Muslim ruminations in his Green Book, living in a luxurious Bedouin tent pitched at his military headquarters, protected by female bodyguards, he sought to conquer an empire in Chad and lead a pan-African union, having himself crowned king of kings. He backed IRA and Palestinian terrorists but also funded Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa. He degenerated into a radical Arab Nero, organizing terrorist atrocities such as the Lockerbie plane explosion, while murdering dissidents, ravishing young girls and grooming his son al-Saif for the succession.

* As for the Angel, Marwan served in Sadat’s office until 1976, when he retired to make a fortune, playing roles in the takeover battles for Harrods and Chelsea Football Club. His espionage was revealed much later by retired Israeli agents. On 27 June 2007, Marwan was killed, impaled on railings beneath his fifth-floor apartment in London. Egyptian potentates and intelligence chiefs attended his funeral. ‘Marwan carried out patriotic acts,’ claimed President Mubarak, implying Marwan was a double agent who had misinformed Israel. Naturally his death was blamed on Mossad, but it is likely he was liquidated by Egyptian intelligence, alarmed that he was planning an autobiography.

* But Mao allowed some of the purged to be rehabilitated: one of those was the Xi family. In 1972, the premier Zhou Enlai, who had himself survived Mao’s terror only by slavish submission, orchestrated a family union for the purged Xi Zhongxun, who had not seen his son Jinping for a decade. It was still hard for the young Xi Jinping: he was rejected seven times when he applied to join the Communist Youth League, ten times when he applied to join the Party. But finally he enrolled to study engineering in Beijing. The hell of the Cultural Revolution was almost over for the family of the future ruler of twenty-first-century China.

* When his brother and nephew demanded money to pay the presidential guard, Nguema had them killed. The nephew’s brother, Teodoro Obiang, decided to kill Nguema before he was killed: he arrested and executed him. Obiang has ruled ever since, promoting to vice-president and heir apparent his son Teodorín, who spent his Californian university days living at the Beverly Hills Hotel and running a $100 million yacht. The country has been ruled by one family since 1968.

* Indira’s husband, the editor and politician Feroze Gandhi (no relation), had died ten years earlier. It was not easy being married to Indira Nehru. For twenty years, the couple had lived with her father, Nehru. Feroze often found himself ignored, murmuring, ‘Look at me! I’m husband to Indira Nehru.’ But as a parliamentarian he was one of the first anti-corruption crusaders, a critic of corporate scandals engineered by business houses of Kolkata connected to Nehru.