OBSERVING THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION: “Today’s quasi-authoritarian Russia is far from admirable. But, despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s lame and self-serving claims to the contrary, it is still a vast improvement over the totalitarian state it replaced. . . . With the demise of the USSR, we were finally rid of a regime that slaughtered millions both within and outside its borders, imposed numerous other human rights violations, and created a threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over the entire world. Compared to that, the very real dangers of the post-Cold War world seem minor by comparison.”