On a chilly day in late 1986, thousands of protesters gathered on the streets of Alma-Ata, then the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan. They were mostly young, and mostly ethnic Kazakh. And they all had one ...

It’s hard to sift history’s judgment from the hot takes, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s telegram of condolence on the death of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev does little to help. “He ...

This article originally appeared in the February 1990 issue of Esquire US. To read every Esquire US story ever published, upgrade to All Access. All across the country that year, party functionaries ...

Forty-seven years to the day after the United States suffered the then-bloodiest attack on our territory at Pearl Harbor, our nation exited an era of continuous fear of annihilation. From World War II ...

Roses are placed on a sculpture of Mikhail Gorbachev at the “Fathers of Unity” memorial in Berlin on Aug. 31. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner The news of Mikhail Gorbachev’s death Aug. 30 at the age of 91 took ...

More than four decades in the news business offer a chance to meet hundreds of noteworthy people — regular folks, brilliant scientists and artists, and a few true movers and shakers. The man who died ...

The paradox of Mikhail Gorbachev’s major accomplishments is that none was intentional—not the destruction of the Soviet Union, not the demise of socialist ideology, not the independence of formerly ...

"Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people – which he genuinely was – he increasingly became despised by many within Russia." Mikhail Gorbachev was a contradictory figure; his ...

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He presided over the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States as well as the dissolution of ...