the Stalin, the Khrushchev, the Brezhnev, and the Gorbachev. I belong to the last of these. It was easier for my generation to accept the defeat of the communist Idea because we hadn’t been born yet when it was still young, strong, and brimming with the magic of fatal romanticism and utopian aspirations. We grew up with the Kremlin ancients, in Lenten, vegetarian times.*8 The great bloodshed of communism had already been lost to the ages. Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was already ingrained in us.
