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Here’s the thing about history: you can’t see everything that is going on when you are living it, and then, when you try to dredge up what really happened, all you’ve got is your frail memories.

On September 28, 1989 – just a few months after Boris Yeltsin's triumph at the Congress of People’s Deputies – the police found a muddied and wet Yeltsin near a dacha community outside Moscow.

In the spring of 1989, elections were held: “alternative elections.” This redundant phrase, which today provokes smirks, back then had everyone in a state of euphoria. We had a choice!

"A classical authoritarian power... does not pay that much attention to what the population thinks, and when it does, this attention is usually limited to a bunch of platitudes loudly proclaimed as the official ideology..."

Stepping through hundreds of years of history, we look back at signal events that have occurred in these fall months.

What do you have to do as Russian tsar to be remembered as "Great"? You can start by reforming the government, social structure, customs, language, and, well, everything else.

A look back at the heady Gorbachev era, a time of rationing and glasnost, perestroika and cooperatives, when everything seemed possible.