John O’Sullivan’s new book “The President, The Pope And The Prime Minister” has a marvelous account of the funeral of Yuri Andropov. In case you’ve forgotten, he was one of those late-period Soviet ...

Paralysis up top. Waiting for people to die seems to have been the main occupation in the last years of Brezhnev's rule, particularly at the heart of the system. A friend of my wife's from her stay in ...