The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The only way forward was to stop Gorbachev’s incessant political zigzagging. If Gorbachev was not going to lead decisive political and economic reform, then Alexander Nikolaevich would try to do it himself. “I must be, I absolutely must be honest before my country, before my people, before my self!” he wrote. “I shall seek dignified ways to fight incipient fascism and the Party’s reactionism, to fight for the democratic transformation of our society. I don’t have that much time left.”29 Alexander Nikolaevich was speaking not so much about the time he personally had left—he was sixty-eight, just eight years older than both Gorbachev and Yeltsin—as about the country, where, he felt, the window of opportunity for change had nearly closed.