Two floors above them in his expansive office, Gorbachev was racking his brain, wondering how to coax the genie back into the bottle. Little late for that, they both knew. He had unleashed his woolly-headed liberalizing ideas-first, that asinine glasnost, then the slam dunk of them all, perestroika-thinking a blitzkrieg of truth and fresh ideas would stave off a collapse that seemed all but inevitable; inevitable to him, anyway. What was he thinking?

The history of the Soviet Union was so thoroughly shameful-so pockmarked with murders, genocide, treachery, corruption, egomania-it needed to rest on a mattress of lies to be even moderately palatable. Fear, flummery, and fairy tales-the three F's-those were the glue that held things together.

Now everything was coming apart at the seams: the Soviet republics were threatening to sprint from the union, the Eastern Bloc countries had already made tracks, and communism itself was teetering into a sad folly.

Way to go, Gorby.

On the streets below them a speaker with windmilling arms and megaphones for tonsils was working up a huge rabble that was growing rowdier and more rambunctious by the second. The bulletproof thickened windows smeared out his exact words; as if they needed to hear; as if they wanted to hear. Same thing street-corner preachers were howling and exhorting from Petersburg to Vladivostok: time for democracy; long past time for capitalism. Communism was an embarrassing failure that needed to be flushed down the toilet of history with all the other old faulty ideas. Just rally around Boris. Let's send Gorby and the last of his wrinkly old apparatchiks packing.

His boss cracked a wrinkled knuckle and asked softly, "So what do I tell Gorbachev?"

"Tell him he's an idiot. Tell him he ruined everything."

"He already knows that."

Then tell him to eat a bullet, Ivan Yutskoi wanted to say. Better yet, do us all a big favor, shove him out the window and have that spot-headed idiot produce a big red splat in the middle of Red Square. Future historians would adore that punctuation point.