The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

soon as the leader died, some of his most recent decisions were reversed: a giant planned show trial was scrapped, and the relatives of some of the members of the Party elite were released from the Gulag. In 1956, at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the new Party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, condemned Stalin as an unworthy successor to Lenin, applied to his rule the damning Marxist term "cult of personality," and disavowed mass arrests and executions.² This was when Alexander Nikolaevich lost his ability to reconcile the Party line and his long-shelved doubts. He asked to be released from the Central Committee in order to study Marx and Marxism—first in Moscow and then for a year at Columbia University in New York. The exercise worked, both because he found Marx profoundly compelling and because the United States on the cusp of the McCarthy era and the Cold War hardly seemed like an appealing alternative to the Soviet system. He returned to the Soviet Union to rejoin the Marxist-Leninist effort.

Still, he remained, in increasing contrast to most of the nomenklatura, a thinker. In 1972, Alexander Nikolaevich published an article titled "Against Ahistoricism." To those who could fight their way through its turgid Soviet language, the article delivered a radical message of protest against what Alexander Nikolaevich saw as the Soviet Union's growing nationalist conservatism based on the glorification of some imaginary peasant class's traditional values.³ "Political exile" to Canada was his punishment for publishing it.⁴ He returned more than a decade later, to become idea man to the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his project of reforming the Party and its country. In December 1985, Alexander Nikolaevich authored a document that proposed radical change:

The main components of perestroika are:

A market economy in which market rates are paid for labor.

The property owner as the agent of freedom.

Democracy and glasnost, which bring with them information accessible to all.

A system of feedback.⁵

To be sure, his idea of democracy was limited: in a letter to Gorbachev he suggested splitting the Communist Party in two—the Socialist Party and the People's Democratic Party—that would make up an entity called the Communist Union, which would run the country. He proposed creating the office of a president, who would be nominated by the Communist Union and voted by the people for a ten-year term. He argued that all this needed to be done because the Soviet government needed to try to stay ahead of the curve.⁶ Alexander Nikolaevich predicted the general vector of events accurately. The Communist Party was never split in two, but in a few years, the Soviet Union would hold a series of hybrid elections: nominations were handled from above, and the resulting legislative bodies had a convoluted structure designed to ensure the primacy of the Communist Party, but for the first time in seven decades, Soviet citizens had some choice at the polls. Gorbachev would indeed become the first president of the Soviet Union. He would also be the last, because the project of staying ahead of the curve failed.

It must have been the summer of 1985 or 1986 that Alexander Nikolaevich and Gorbachev spent together at a Party dacha in the Crimea. Seryozha met Ksenia, Gorbachev's granddaughter, and in another year or two they would spend the summer together at a nomenklatura children's camp on the Black Sea, but this summer, as the two men talked endlessly about what to do with their country, Seryozha was largely left to his own devices. He roamed the fenced-in grounds, which seemed boundless. He explored buildings that were designed to look like castles and had underground tunnels connecting them. He climbed down into the tunnels. Only later would it occur to Seryozha that the grounds had been heavily guarded and he had been watched at all times. Much later he would wonder, he would obsess, about how much of what he remembered of his childhood was real— whether he was ever really alone, and whether he was ever really loved by the people who surrounded him. Like the cook at his grandfather's dacha, who seemed to adore little Seryozha—later Seryozha's sister told him the cook had been a KGB colonel, and this

made Seryozha wonder whether the love had been a part of his assignment.