At the end of the Soviet Union, all the secrets came out.The gulag was real, and the cancelled Solzhenitsyn was vindicated. The USSR really had murdered Poles at Katyn, while blaming it on the Nazis. Millions of innocents truly had been liquidated by Lenin and Stalin. And Chernobyl was indeed a coverup.Everything everyone had darkly suspected to be true was confirmed, and then some. The consequence was the meltdown of a nuclear-armed superpower. It lost its European satellites, and its overseas military bas ...