Whether he relished the task or not, Gorbachev was acting as the keeper of the secrets, the chief curator of the Party’s criminal history. Just as the Soviet regime combined brutality and the technology of the totalitarian state to leave behind tens of millions of corpses and a perverse social order, it also used the completeness of the state, the pervasiveness of every institution from the kindergartens to the secret police, to put an end to historical inquiry.
