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    01 September 22 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News   FOCUS: Masha Gessen | Mikhail Gorbachev, the Fundamentally Soviet Man Masha Gessen, The New Yorker Gessen writes: "The last leader of the U.S.S.R. attempted to modernize and reform his country, even as he failed to imagine it as anything but an empire." The last leader of the U.S.S.R. attempted to modernize and reform his country, even as he failed to imagine it as anything but an empire. M ikhail Gorbachev , the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow, on Tuesday, at the age of ninety-one. In the last two decades of his life, he rarely granted interviews. So, in 2010, when he agreed to speak to someone from a Moscow magazine that I edited, I felt both awe and some misgivings: here was a unique opportunity that would almost certainly be wasted. Gorbachev was a notoriously terrible interviewee. He rambled; he went off on tangents; he almost never finished a sentence. In a desperate move, my colle...