Me and Mikhail Gorbachev

People have been coming up to me on the street, demanding to know, needing to know, how on Earth I could believe that Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, could possibly know anything about me. Is there even any remotely rational basis to my belief, people have been asking?

Well, here's what I experienced. It was late December 1991. Bob Strauss was U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved the next day. Two days later, on 27 December, Boris Yeltsin moved into Gorbachev's old office in the Kremlin, in Moscow.

I don't know the exact date, but one day in late December 1991 there was a hubbub at the Cleveland Park Branch of the D.C. Library, managed by Brian P. Brown.

When I left the library that afternoon and arrived in my apartment building, the manager, Elaine Wranik (now deceased) looked through me, as it were, as if I was invisible! She seemed shaken -- but perhaps I am exaggerating in retrospect. If I were to attach words to her expression they would be: "Why, he was never anything but a smart-ass white boy!"

I thought at that moment: "He must have talked to Gorbachev."

And those were my perceptions and reactions. That's all I know -- or "know."