It was 1988, and President Ronald Reagan was speaking at a summit in Moscow. In a style that few could emulate, Reagan told a joke. It went like this: “An American man, boasting to his Russian friend, ...

As the Kremlin’s hard-line Communist ideologist, he initially embraced his boss’s modernizing reforms before turning against them as threats to the Soviet order. By Robert D. McFadden The leadership ...

Mikhail Gorbachev was a contradictory figure with a complex legacy. Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people—which he genuinely was—he increasingly became despised by many within ...