all the strands of a long-brewing rebellion had come together: his anger at his father’s unacknowledged crimes, his absorption of his mother’s quiet resistance and his grandmother’s hidden religious beliefs; his detestation of the system he had grown up in and his love of the Western freedoms he had discovered; his simmering outrage over the Soviet repressions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Wall; his sense of his own dramatic destiny, cultural superiority and optimistic faith in a better Russia.
