[philwelch]

There was, in fact, a coup against Gorbechev shortly afterwards, bearing out the fears of Thatcher and Mitterand.

Of course, the coup petered out, Boris Yeltsin climbed atop one of the tanks and addressed the crowd of anti-Communist protesters who had assembled outside of the Russian Parliament building, and the Soviet Union promptly collapsed, which is not a series of events that anyone in the West had predicted.