The Soviet Union officially ended 30 years ago — if one had to pick a specific date, then on December 25 1991, with the lowering of the Soviet flag from the roof of the Kremlin’s Senate Palace and the handover of the nuclear button from the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But the USSR is not really gone. It’s an unburied corpse, like the body of its founder Vladimir Lenin still on display from 10am till 1pm in a granite mausoleum on Red Square. Its stench still lingers in many a corner of the world, not just in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, its legal and — though Putin would deny it — spiritual successor. I should know: My Soviet childhood and young adulthood shaped me so that even now, in 2021, I must admit I’m still in many ways part of “a new historic community, the Soviet people”, which my namesake, Leonid Brezhnev, proudly proclaimed in 1971, the year of my birth...