The World

* But there was a dark side to Reagan’s sunlit America: in 1981, doctors started to treat a cluster of pneumonia and skin cancer cases among gay men and drug users. Initially fear and ignorance led to wild rumours about a ‘Gay Plague’, but doctors soon realized they were facing a new disease, AIDS, passed mainly by unprotected sex, particularly anal, by contaminated syringes and also from mother to child in pregnancy. In the next forty years, it killed thirty-six million people. Initially AIDS cut a swathe through the US and European gay communities, defining the 1980s as a time of desperate suffering. In southern Africa, it spread through the entire population, exacerbated by a stigma against using condoms, and even presidents encouraged irresponsible conspiracy theories and false cures that hugely increased the death toll: over fifteen million Africans died. Although preventative education is lowering infection rates and patients now usually survive thanks to retroviral drugs, in 2011 there were 23 million people living with AIDS in Africa, where each year 1.2 million die and 1.8 million are infected. Those rates are now improving.

* Sinatra, an old friend, now a Republican, sang at his Inaugural Gala. It was now too that the FBI finally broke the power of the Mafia’s Five Families, using new legislation, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, to link the bosses of the criminal conspiracies to their soldiers. The godfathers were sentenced to over 100 years in prison.

* After the interview by this author, Mrs Thatcher decided that the interview had been ‘cheeky’ and resolved to do no more schoolboy interviews.

* When this author visited Albania, the then premier Sali Berisha, who lived in Shehu’s old house in the Block, showed him the room where Shehu was shot. ‘We still don’t know,’ he said, ‘exactly what happened.’ Soon afterwards, on 11 April 1985, Hoxha died, succeeded by a chosen disciple. His original patron and later rival Marshal Tito had died in 1980 aged eighty-seven. Even in eastern Europe the guard was changing.

ACT TWENTY-TWO

4.4 BILLION

Yeltsins and Xis, Nehruvians and Assads, Bin Ladens, Kims and Obamas

THE IDIOT AND THE CANNON: GORBACHEV, DENG AND THE UNIPOWER

As hundreds of thousands were endangered and finally evacuated from the environs of Chernobyl, Gorbachev tried to suppress the news, only announcing it almost a month later. The costs placed more pressure on the economy and on Gorbachev, who now pivoted to plan his own radical explosion. His first reforms to free the economy from Party supervision did not immediately solve his problems. In January 1987, going further than Andropov, he took an astonishing decision that was almost romantically delusional: he would not only reform the economy but set up a sort of one-party demokratizatsiya through a real election to produce a Congress of 2,250 people’s deputies that would outrank the Politburo and government. He was misunderstanding Lenin, who always asked, ‘Who controls whom?’ Lenin had commandeered, then neutered, the Soviets in order to concentrate awesome power in his own hands. Gorbachev was trying to withdraw from the empire, and reform the economy simultaneously with political liberalization, a move bound to stimulate nationalism among the many peoples in the USSR, and political disintegration in Moscow. To try all three was so ambitious as to be either naive or hubristic, almost suicidal.

Abroad, Gorbachev realized that he could not reform the state while engaged in ferocious competition with America. He proposed the phasing out of all nuclear weapons by 2000: in October 1986, he and Reagan met in Reykjavik and almost abolished nuclear weapons. The two got on well, though their wives disliked each other. Later Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would withdraw troops from eastern Europe, embracing not world revolution but ‘all-human values’. The Americans were unsure if this was real or just window dressing, but Reagan kept up the pressure. When he visited the Berlin Wall he said, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’

At home, Yeltsin trailblazed through Moscow, walking to work or taking the Metro, visiting cafés, shops and factories, handing out watches – his devoted bodyguard Korzhakov kept spares in his pocket. Gorbachev sneered at this self-promotion; Yeltsin found the general secretary ‘patronizing’. In January 1987, he criticized Gorbachev for being over-optimistic about perestroika; Gorbachev shot back at Yeltsin’s ‘loud, empty, ultra-leftist words’.

‘I’m still new in the Politburo,’ said Yeltsin apologetically. ‘This is a good lesson for me.’