emotions kindled at that moment have not diminished to this day, and they completely altered my thinking. 179 Sakharov’s thinking was shared by many of his counterparts across the ocean, but what was remarkable about the Soviet Union is that Sakharov’s thinking was shared—with their whole beings—by a growing number of inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen working on much less explosive devices. In theory— and often enough in practice to produce a sense of unrelieved humiliation—the Party claimed the right to make all decisions about everything—from the Bomb to whether one was worthy of a trip to Bulgaria (as Vladimir Zhirinovsky would recall in 1996). What added injury to insult was the fact that the Soviet economy of the “stagnation period” (like the economy of late imperial Russia or European colonial empires) could not expand fast enough to accommodate the professionals it kept manufacturing. At the same time, it became clear that the Soviet intellectual elite had congealed into a hereditary institution, and that the higher in the professional hierarchy one went, the more hereditary intellectuals one found. In the 1970s, 81.2 percent of the “young specialists” working in the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences were children of white-collar professionals. They knew they belonged to a cohesive social group with a lofty mission and an uncertain future. Many of them shared Sakharov’s thinking. 180 Acutely aware of this Frankensteinian dilemma, the Party reacted by reintroducing massive affirmative action programs for blue-collar workers. But because it did not reintroduce massive repression against white-collar workers, it merely added to the resentment of the entrenched cultural elite without jeopardizing its ascendance (well-protected by superior education and patronage). The result was an ever widening social gap between the Party ideologues, who continued to be recruited from newly promoted provincials of humble backgrounds, and the hereditary inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, who thought of themselves as the guardians of both professional competence and high culture. The Party hung on to its ideological rhetoric and political monopoly, but most apparatchiks tacitly recognized the primacy of the professionals insofar as they raised their own children to be professionals, not apparatchiks. The Soviet regime ended the way it had begun: with “dual power.” In 1917, the standoff between the Provisional Government, which had formal authority but no power, and the Petrograd Soviet, which had power but no formal authority, had ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who had Knowledge and Truth. In the 1980s, the standoff between the Party apparatus, which had power and formal authority, and the intelligentsia, which had