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I attended an event which I believe may have led to the rapid loss of power in Moscow.

Soviet propagandist Georgi Arbatov was, as communists go, an urbane, not thoroughly detestable, middle-aged bureaucrat in charge of something called the North American Institute in Moscow. The purpose of this group was to influence public opinion in North America in favor of the USSR.

I don’t need to tell this group of readers what general concepts that entailed. This was at the time when Gorbachev had brought out perestroika and glasnost.

Arbatov thought he would be speaking to a mixed but mostly liberal crowd in Toronto at a large auditorium on the university campus. He droned on about the wonders of glasnost and perstroika for some time, before segments of the crowd got restless and started chanting in east European languages.

It turned out that 95% of the people who attended this lecture were not gullible liberal students and bourgeoisie types, but hard-line anti-communists (that is essentially why I had gone out of my way to attend, my attitude was, Gorbachev is better than most communists, but his reforms would very likely destabilize the country and lead to a counter-revolution, so I wanted to see for myself what kind of people were running the show).

Arbatov eventually panicked, and retreated from the stage to some safe room guarded by burly KGB agents. The crowd were not particularly violent, but very agitated. At the moment he gave up trying, somebody was proclaiming very loudly in religious tones. I don’t speak east European languages but a friend of mine said he thought it was a curse from God being hurled at the Soviet representative on behalf of millions of persecuted Christians.

It was only a year later that the Berlin wall fell and the process of disintegration of the USSR began.

My belief is that Arbatov, a confident and probably within the politburo a persuasive figure, was broken by this experience and it must have become known back in Moscow when he returned (possibly before that).

I have always hoped to see a similar event destroy the confidence of this new form of communism we have in our own countries today. God knows we have all yelled at somebody, out of sheer frustration that nobody seems to get what is happening, but so far it hasn’t been as effective as the night in Toronto when they shouted down Soviet communism at its finest hour (which is not saying much, but if every Soviet leader had been as reasonable and capable as Gorbachev, the USSR might still be ticking along — and I know, it is, under Putin — that part remains a bit of a mystery but I accept that basically the communists are back just under a new branding, and irony of ironies, their biggest enemies seem to be western leftist politicians.)

Pray for that same voice to be heard again in the land.