Mikhail Gorbachev has died

The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet Union to glasnost and perestroika.

Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.

The huge metal show in Moscow shows just how much optimism there was in that moment.

If you've never seen this footage, definitely look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W7wqQwa-TU

1.6 million people in an airfield at a free concert that lasted all day. There's a documentary about it but I've not watched it.

It's so disappointing the world couldn't bring that optimism to fruition, and instead kleptocrats took over.

Not to take away from that awesome concert, but Lars has stated several times it was closer to 500k, but somehow the number keeps growing...

> However, Lars explained in the conversation that he doesn’t know the exact number how many people were in the concert, but he heard at the time that there were half a million people attended the show.

> “Listen, it may go up by 100,000 people each year! I heard at the time it was around half a million. Whatever it was, it was a f*ck-load of people.

https://metalheadzone.com/lars-ulrich-clarifies-the-myth-tha...

I just went with the wikipedia article which has two sources, both just newspaper articles, so who knows.

It's not implausible though. There've been a handful of concerts as large as 3 million apparently. That just boggles my mind. Can you imagine standing on a stage like that?