EPITAPH FOR WORLD COMMUNISM 399invitations; but the likelihood of any one of these three accepting
the invitation to spend days of leisure with the man who was steadily
throwing aside the legacy of the October Revolution was low. Kim
anyway had a pathological fear of international travel.^37 Gorbachëv
was probably pleased that the North Korean leader was unlikely to
leave his peninsula. He had a cluster of urgent international dilemmas
to resolve, and a shared vacation with the Far East’s aged dogmatist
would hardly sharpen his reflections.