Nothing to do with fairy tales and not romantic; certainly realistic; though, in a way, in principle, in fact, it is highly idealistic. A city bus, crowded with people, in a city street in central Europe on a November afternoon and it’s stalled. What else? Oh, dear. Oh, damn. But no, it hasn’t stalled; the engine, for a wonder, hasn’t broken down; it’s just that it can’t go any farther. Why not? Because there’s a bus stopped in front of it, and another one stopped in front of that one at the cross street, and it looks like everything has stopped. Nobody on this bus has heard the word gridlock, the name of an exotic disease of the mysterious West. There aren’t enough private cars in Krasnoy to bring about a gridlock even if they knew what it was. There are cars, and a lot of wheezing, idealistic buses, but all there is enough of to stop the flow of traffic in Krasnoy is people. It is a kind of equation, proved by experiments conducted over many years, perhaps not in a wholly scientific or objective spirit but nonetheless presenting a well-documented result confirmed by repetition: There are not enough people in this city to stop a tank. Even in much larger cities, it has been authoritatively demonstrated as recently as last spring that there are not enough people to stop a tank But there are enough people in this city to stop a bus, and they are doing so. Not by throwing themselves in front of it, waving banners or singing songs about Liberty’s eternal day, but merely by being of the g in the street, getting in the way bus, on the supposition that the bus driver has not been trained in either homicide or suicide, and on the same supposition-upon which all cities stand or fall-that they are also getting in the way of all the other buses and all the cars and in one another’s way, too, so that nobody is going much of anywhere, in a physical sense.