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Sometimes key historic moments occur for the most mundane of reasons.

Thirty years ago, on May 19, 1983, Eugene Whelan, the Liberal cabinet minister of the Trudeau-era who passed away this February, was late for dinner.

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Mind you, this was not just any dinner. Waiting to dine with him at his home in Amherstburg, Ont., near Windsor, was an entourage of dignitaries from the Soviet Union. The two most important guests were Mikhail Gorbachev, then a high-ranking member of the Politburo and the secretary of agriculture and Aleksandr “Sashka” Yakovlev, the Soviet Ambassador to Canada.

As Mr. Whelan’s wife, Liz, made small-talk with the visitors, Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yakovlev decided to take a walk beside the fields of corn and soybeans. The stroll would become “the walk that changed the world,” in the words of journalist Christopher Shulgan, the author of a 2008 book about Mr. Yakovlev.

In an intense and personal conversation that lasted three-hours, the seeds of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), Mr. Gorbachev’s monumental, if only partly successful, policies that ultimately triggered the dissolution of the Soviet Union were planted. Or, at any rate, Mr. Yakovlev confirmed what Mr. Gorbachev, who would become the general secretary of the Communist Party within less than two years, already had been thinking and hearing from other advisors.