Street demonstrations in previous years were crushed by the country’s military, which has long supported Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez.
When Trump made the unsubstantiated claim on Twitter that his predecessor had wiretapped him in the waning days of the 2016 election, it diverted attention from the growing body of undisputed reports that his surrogates and staffers had met with the Russian ambassador before and after the election.
It was here that Mr Gorbačëv’s predecessors, Soviet leaders like Lenin, Stalin and Brežnev, lay in state, too.