For some a man who looked ahead, and who tried to save what could be saved from communism by ferrying it towards greater popular participation, for others the graver of the only remedy against capitalist exploitation.The disappearance of a protagonist of the eighties of the short century invites us to an epochal reflection: Michail Gorbachev represents the icon of a human era that will go beyond the limits of a single generation.Because the Eighties were also Gorbachevians, but they carried the sign of other divisive charisms, such as Thatcher's, who held power from 1979 until the 1990s, much longer than the courageous reformer of Russia no longer the USSR, without forget about Reagan's re-election, another conservative icon.Post-Marxian reformism, therefore, against a hyper-liberal counterpart, in a confrontation crossed by other new forms that dominated those years: the return to the image, to the bursting individuality that in the world of song, for example, will never be more just song, but iconic assertiveness, hyper-individual and provocative affirmation of an irrepressible self-image: and then here is the emergence of Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, and a transformer like Michael Jackson, a seduction that came not only from complex elaborations a half between avant-garde, folk, contemporary classic and rock, as in the case of Genesis and their frontman Peter Gabriel (who glided with a rope like a liana among the Sanremo audience), but who penetrated into the glamor romantic of the Duran Duran or the aestheticizers Spandau Ballet, who, however, another apparent contradiction of an era, spoke painfully of the civil war in Northern Ireland with the touching "Through thebarricades ".The community thrust of the late sixties and the seventies had left its mark: entire formations, many artists had declared themselves aligned and covered with the ideological commitment and had declared individual subordination to a secular faith that would however have had homicidal drifts right into the eighties , with victims in the servants of the state, in the trade unionists;how innocent were the 85 killed by the bomb at the Bologna station in the tragic opening of the decade.The year of the assassination of Vittorio Bachelet and Walter Tobagi, but with another sign of change in the Iron Curtain: Solidarnosc was born, a further notice of work in progress for an east in which iron Marxist communism was showing cracks from the outside , but also from the inside: Gorbachev will be, from 1985, the evident proof, because his leadership was apparently born in continuity, but in reality it began the break with the past: the youngest Soviet leader ever, elected only for the 54-year-old USSR immediately undertook to rejuvenate the party and the entire Soviet-driven system.So much so that two years later he signed a historic treaty on disarmament and for the withdrawal of Euromissiles with the conservative Reagan, a US effigy for practically all of the Eighties.The Nobel Prize, practically at the end of his six years (few, but today history), was largely due to that treaty, to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and also to the start of a sort of new NEP, that New Economic Policy that Lenin had established in Soviet Russia since 1921 to try to ease the grip of hunger after the civil war and the First World War, re-establishing a sort of disguised free economy.For some a man who looked ahead, and who tried to save what could be saved from communism by ferrying it towards greater popular participation, for others the graver of the only remedy against capitalist exploitation.The latter did not take into account the phenomenon China, which in the incredible irrationality (the Hegelians do not take it) of history, after the massacres of students who asked for freedom, began a slow passage towards state capitalism while preserving ancient party nomenclatures .The heirs of Mao and the newly rampant capitalism, the push towards the freedom of the countries of the East and the return to the traditionalism of Islamic fundamentalist revolutions, the attempts of a democratic and liberal socialism, albeit with a strong and assertive leadership like that craxiana, and then tangentopoli are the signs of that path.One of the symbols of the decade, John Paul II, addressed the contradictory knots of that era by relying on the essential need for freedom against slavery, of whatever political color it was.No, it was not a one-way time, because it represented the flaws of history and the anguish of ideologies.A time when Gorbachev fought bravely to reconcile socialism and humanism.Everyone in the square to meet and listen.Finally, after the period of inactivity due to the pandemic, from Thursday 8 September a series of meetings will start on "Thursdays with the authors ... literary itineraries in the piazzetta" which will animate the space of Piazzetta Milano Urban Relax until 13 October from 5.30 pm onwards. .Monica Rita Bedana is the translator of Eugenio Scalfari's first interview with Pope Francis for Repubblica: "It was a double vertigo."From the Bassa Padovana to Turin via Salamanca Oggi Bedana.maintains strong ties with Veneto, directs the School of the University of Salamanca in Italy and translates for Bompiani, Lindau, Einaudi and Gran VìaIt is evident that all the spasmodic individualistic research is never absolute, but rather sprinkled with crises, second thoughts, regrets.At the Fenice park, in via lungargine Rovetta 28 in Padua, on Saturday 3 September from 4.30 pm there is the appointment "Farmers and consumers", promoted by Angoli di mondo for a moment of meeting and conviviality, but also of training on development issues sustainable.We have to go back in time, to Christmas 1985, to remember such high inflation.After almost forty years, the impact on the economy is heavy, especially for less well-off families.According to Istat, in August 2022 the national consumer price index for the entire community (Nic) rose by 8.4% on an annual basis.For Giuseppe Di Taranto, emeritus professor of Economic and Business History at the Luiss University and of Political Economy at the European University of Rome, the problem cannot be tackled only at home but together with the European UnionAlso paying homage to Queen Elizabeth's deep Christian faith and her life of service was Bishop Hugh Gilbert, president of the Scottish Catholic Bishops' Conference."It went through the twentieth century, which was a complicated century. The world has changed more in the last 70 years than in previous centuries and some changes have started in Great Britain. Just think of the birth of the welfare state that spread after the Second World War the idea of ​​making life easier for citizens ".Silvia Cassamagnaghi, professor of contemporary history at the State University of Milan, comments on the death of Queen Elizabeth II“Queen Elizabeth II will always remain a shining light in our history.May you now rest in peace ”.“Queen Elizabeth II Requiescat in Pace”.With these words full of sorrow, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, archbishop of Westminster and president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, pays homage to the Queen with a statement released in the minutes following the announcement of her death by the royal family.La Difesa srl ​​- VAT number 05125420280La Difesa del Popolo receives public contributions to publishingLa Difesa del Popolo, through the Fisc (Italian Federation of Catholic Weekly) has joined the IAP (Institute of Advertising Self-discipline) by accepting the Self-Regulatory Code of Commercial Communication