AMONG THE MANY THINGS that grew confusing in the late 1980s was the left-right dichotomy. The way Alexander Nikolaevich used the word “right,” it was but a stand-in for “conservative” in the most basic sense of the word: just wanting things to stay the way they were. But the way they were, nominally, was “left”—the most conservative force was the Communist Party. Few people, therefore, wanted to call themselves “left.” That made everyone “right,” or something closer to “radical” or “democratic” as opposed to conservative.
