The Chinese communist leadership, which had just emerged from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, preferred brute force to reclaim “the mandate of Heaven.” Gorbachev, as his loyal aide Shakhnazarov recalled in 1992, “lacked the guts to have his Tiananmen. He only had to suppress the first stirrings of separatists and radicals, and the Soviet Union would have remained in good health. This, however, would have meant bidding farewell to his glorious dream of bringing democracy to our country and would have dealt an irrevocable blow to his personal prestige as a reformer.”60 Prestige among the
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