The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen Page A

probably why many citizens of Peter the Great’s city, much of which was literally crumbling, experienced the loss of this particular hotel as almost a personal injury.
    The demolition of the hotel was planned; what was not planned was the birth, at the site of the destruction, of a movement that would play a key role in bringing down the Soviet regime.
    Mikhail Gorbachev had become the leader of the Soviet state in March 1985. He had spent the first year of his reign solidifying his base in the Politburo. In his second year in office, he floated the term perestroika —restructuring—though no one, not even Gorbachev himself, quite knew what he meant. In December 1986, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union’s best-known dissident, Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, to return to his home in Moscow from the city of Gorky, where he had lived in internal exile for almost seven years. In January 1987, Gorbachev advanced another new term, glasnost , or openness—which did not, for the then foreseeable future, mean that censorship would be abolished, but it seemed to mean that censorship would change: for example, libraries across the country began loosening access to materials that had been kept under lock and key. In February 1987, Gorbachev commuted the sentences of 140 dissidents who had been serving time in Soviet prisons and labor colonies.
    To be sure, Gorbachev did not intend to dissolve the Soviet Union, or to end the Communist Party’s rule, or, really, to change the regime in a radical way—though he himself was fond of using the word radical . Rather, he dreamed of modernizing the Soviet economy and Soviet society in discreet ways, without undermining theirbasic structures. But the processes he set in motion led inevitably—and, in retrospect, very rapidly—to the total collapse of the Soviet system.
    Five years before the tectonic shift, subtle subterranean tremors began. Gorbachev had dangled the carrot of possible change—and so people began to talk about change as if it were possible. Cautiously, people began to allow these conversations to spill out of their kitchens and into other people’s living rooms. Loose alliances began to take shape. For the first time in decades, people were seriously discussing politics and pressing social issues neither as members of a dissident movement nor within the confines of formal Communist Party structures—which is how those who took part in these conversations became known as the “informals.” A majority of the informals belonged to a specific generation: those born during the Khrushchev thaw, the brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Stalinist terror had lifted and Brezhnev’s stagnation had not yet set in. The informals had no common political platform, or a common language for the discussion of politics, or even a common understanding of the place of such a discussion, but they shared two things: a distaste for the ways of the Soviet state, and an abiding desire to protect and preserve what little was left of their beloved historic city.
    “The people of our generation saw only a dead end ahead: if you did not escape, you’d face degradation,” Yelena Zelinskaya recalled twenty years later. Zelinskaya put out one of several samizdat publications that united the informals. “We could no longer breathe among the lies, the hypocrisy, and the stupidity. There was no fear. And as soon as the first rays of light seemed to break through—as soon as people whose hands had been tied were allowed to move at least a few fingers—people started to move. People weren’t thinking about money, or about improving their standing in life; all anyone thought about was freedom. Freedom to conduct your private life as you wish, freedom to travel and see the world. Freedom from hypocrisyand the freedom not to listen to hypocrisy; freedom from libel, freedom from feeling ashamed for one’s parents, freedom from the viscous lies in which all of us were