Yet the traditional reflexes of secrecy and paranoia were deeply ingrained. The truth about incidents of any kind that might undermine Soviet prestige or provoke public panic had always been suppressed: even three decades after it had happened, the 1957 explosion in Mayak had still, officially, never taken place; when a Soviet air force pilot mistakenly shot down a Korean Air jumbo jet in 1983, killing all 269 people on board, the USSR initially denied any knowledge of the incident. And Gorbachev’s grip on power remained tenuous, vulnerable to the kind of reactionary revolt that had destroyed
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