In the autumn of 1988, the Independent magazine sent me to Estonia to report on the Kremlin’s waning power in the Soviet Baltic. Alexander Chancellor, the editor, sensed that the USSR was in trouble: Estonia was agitating for independence; Poland, Hungary and other Eastern bloc states on the edge of the Slavic world were sure to follow. I decided to travel to Estonia by ferry from Helsinki. A hammer and sickle ensign flapped red from the stern; lifeboat instructions were in Cyrillic only. 

In the capital, Tallinn, an air of indigence hung over the Soviet shops where Estonians queued hopefully for scrag ends of meat. The foyer of the Intourist hotel where I was staying teemed with money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’) and prostitutes from Tashkent and other parts of Soviet Central Asia where the red star of revolution had never shone that brightly. The top floor officially did not exist; it was occupied by the KGB, whose in-room listening devices and electronic limpets (fitted to the underside of restaurant dinner plates) came to light only after Estonia broke free of the Kremlin in 1991. The talk was of Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reforms but the common complaint in Tallinn was ‘vene värk!’ (Russian stuff!): it was easier to find a packet of Moscow cigarettes than a tin of Baltic sprats. Soviet tanks were stationed in front of the parliament building in the Upper Town and a fleet of black ZiL limousines with curtained windows was parked outside my hotel: nomenklatura.

Cold War Tallinn was effectively a Soviet garrison city. Kremlin hard-­liners were aghast that Estonia had become a display case for Gorbachev’s plan to introduce controlled profit-­making into the Soviet command economy and, as Robert Service puts it in his superb new book on the USSR’s collapse, eradicate ‘seventy years