December 16, 1986. It was a cold winter day in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Soviet Union’s Kazakh Socialist Republic. Every Sunday, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, would publish a weekly forecast for the entire Soviet Union. The newspaper’s December 14 forecast for the week read, “The icy air of polar winter … Continue reading Alma-Ata, 1986: The First Test of Gorbachev’s Glasnost