Out of the frying pan

n July 1986, James Birch, a young London gallerist with vague designs on global domination, set offfor the Soviet Union. It was his first visit and he had no idea what to expect. Mikhail Gorbachev had been general secretary of the Communist party for one year: and were in the air (or, at any rate, in the British newspapers). But still, Moscow was a world apart. On the advice of his travelling companion, a “cultural entrepreneur” whose carpet business often took him