Publish Date: Jan. 1, 1990
Cover Story: The Unlikely Patron of Change
How TIME Covered the News: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev went from being a party apparatchik to the man who presided over the blossoming of freedoms and the unraveling of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. TIME likened him to a magician, capable of the following:
“The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world-historical stage. Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished. The shell of an old world cracked, its black iron fragments dropping away, and something new, alive, exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings.”