professionals; the success of Soviet professionals required “a struggle of opinions” (as Stalin had put it); the struggle of opinions led a growing number of Soviet professionals away from Soviet modernity. Unlike Marx’s capitalists but very much like the Russian imperial state, the Communist Party had created its own grave diggers—the intelligentsia. Like Peter the Great’s new service elite, the new “Soviet intelligentsia” was created to serve the state but ended up serving its own “consciousness” (split, in various proportions, between “progress” and the “people”). The more desperately the state clung to its founding Truth and the more intransigent it became in its instrumental approach to the educated elite, the more passionate that elite became in its opposition to the state and its attachment to (true) progress and the people. For Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, the greatest Soviet champion of true (non-state) progress, and eventually the conscience of the Westernizing segment of the Soviet intelligentsia, the moment of truth came in 1955, after a successful test of his “device.” According to Sakharov’s memoirs, the test was followed by a banquet at the residence of Marshal Nedelin, the commander of Soviet Strategic Missile Forces. When we were all in place, the brandy was poured. The bodyguards stood along the wall. Nedelin nodded to me, inviting me to propose the first toast. Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.” The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Nedelin grinned a bit crookedly. Then he rose, glass in hand, and said: “Let me tell a parable. An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying on the stove, said: ‘Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.” My whole body tensed, and I think I turned pale—normally I blush. . . . The point of the story (half lewd, half blasphemous, which added to its unpleasant effect) was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control. The people at the top of Party and military hierarchy would make the decision. I knew this already—I wasn’t that naïve. But understanding something in an abstract way is different from feeling it with your whole being, like the reality of life and death. The ideas and