During dinner they argued about Mikhail Gorbachev. He was an innocent fool to believe that with his glasnost and perestroika he could liberalise to a minimal controllable extent the tired old tyranny and still have the party in command. This was Peter’s view. Or, as Roland and Daphne argued, he was a genius and a saint who understood, ahead of his colleagues, that the entire communist experiment, its violently imposed empire, its instinct for murder and implausible lies, had been a grotesque failure and had to be ended.
