There, I would listen to gales of what seemed impossible demands for independence. I would travel on through the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, where the cries for freedom mixed with those for an end to “Russification” – the policy of stacking Baltic populations with Russian immigrants who got the best housing and jobs.

Mikhail Gorbachev, as it happened, was responsible for my presence on those tracks all those years ago. Having ordered the Soviet Union to shake off its economic and political stagnation through “perestroika” – restructuring – Gorbachev had also granted permission for his people to speak freely about the USSR’s problems, a policy known as “glasnost”, meaning openness and transparency.

It is difficult now to imagine the impact of such policies on a people who had learned to be terrified of publicly speaking their minds. A pre-dawn knock on the door and exile to the gulags of Siberia had proved the fate of millions. In the West, talk of openness and restructuring in the Soviet Union was met with scepticism. An Estonian poet, however, told me: “Once you have taken your first breath, it is impossible to stop breathing.”

Gorbachev was keen to show the world he was serious. He ordered that foreign journalists be invited to visit the Soviet Union, and that they be free to choose where they wished to go. I received just such an invitation and risked a knock-back when I requested to visit the restive Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The Soviet Embassy in Canberra held out on issuing a visa until two days before I was to depart. Perhaps it was simply an extension of the everyday inefficiency strangling the Soviet Union. Everywhere I travelled, surly attendants closed doors in my face as I approached seeking assistance, or to change money, or to purchase anything.

An allegedly first-class restaurant was empty, waiters standing around, the whole comedy visible through locked glass doors. I was told there was not a seat available. My guide, furiously embarrassed, demanded we be given a table. The food was all but inedible.

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Factories operated with ancient machinery at a pace that might, if you were generous, be described as idle. Masters of black humour offered a refrain: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”

Hotel bills were calculated on ancient adding machines and jotted in pencil. On every street, black marketeers offered 10 roubles to an American dollar. The official rate was one rouble to two dollars. It was a theatre of the absurd. Yet, long experience of tyranny meant no one quite believed it could change.

Perhaps it would not have, if Gorbachev did not push his twin visions of perestroika and glasnost and allow the Cold War to collapse without serious bloodshed.

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That old train journey, thus, ended at least metaphorically at the start of a brief golden period when a genuinely hopeful world seemed possible, and began to emerge. It is why we must remember Gorbachev as among the most significant world leaders of his century.

And yet, when the USSR disintegrated and 15 Soviets gained independence and the map of Europe was altered for the better, Gorbachev was not forgiven at home.

His people, it turned out, had wanted freedom but wanted to retain the idea of their old Russian empire more. They ended up with the would-be czar, Vladimir Putin. And so the world turns.

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