Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad Read Free Book Online Page A

world history, comparative and pragmatic economics, and met for the first time a crowd of congenial young people in many ways much like herself.
    Everyone here whose family lacked connections had arrived at Lomonosov University by a process similar to her own. Thus the composition of the student body represented the realistic triumph of Soviet egalitarianism. The children of Party officials, bureaucrats, academics, and other members of the inevitable national elite might have a leg up by virtue of the luck of their birth, but at least the real sons and daughters of workers and peasants could earn their way into their company without regard to parental fortune as long as they made their grades and took care to present a wholesome enough image to teachers and youth leaders.
    Those in the Golden Circle for the most part kept to themselves, and the “Workers and Peasants,” as Sonya’s crowd sardonically dubbed themselves, had little use for those they referred to as the “Children of the Damned.”
    “Meritocracy” was one of the buzzwords of the period when perestroika really started taking bites out of the flabby buttocks of all the entrenched bureaucracies, meaning that the children of the Golden Circle were far less likely to inherit anything from their apparatchik parents save an odious reputation, and the Workers and Peasants, the Meritocrats, were far more likely to be the beneficiaries of the new age as the true Children of Gorbachev.
    This might be said to be Sonya’s first awakening to political consciousness, if of a rather careerist sort, an awakening, such as it was, greatly enhanced during her last two years at Lomonosov Universityby her relationship with Yuli Vladimirovich Markovsky, her first really serious boyfriend in more ways than one.
    Unlike Sonya, who as a Muscovite was constrained to live at home with her parents, Yuli, as a student from the provinces, had the right to a bed in an on-campus dormitory. This he scorned, choosing instead to rent a tiny room out in Nikulino, which he could barely afford, and which put him three Métro stops from the university. He pretended that this was some sort of ideological statement, when actually it was more of an open invitation to the hordes of Moscow girls living with their parents while they attended the university, to whom the possibility of any kind of overnight tryst at all was enough to make them less than particular about with whom. Even when it came to sex, Yuli was something of a romantic careerist.
    Like Sonya, Yuli sought a career in the foreign service. But unlike Sonya, Yuli wasn’t just interested in foreign travel. He saw entering the foreign service as the first step on his long march to the post of Foreign Minister, from which vantage he could best serve the interests of both the Soviet Union and himself, living the high life of a top government official with all the helicopters and first-class world travel it implied while fulfilling the emerging Eurorussian vision.
    The thing about Yuli that charmed Sonya was that with him this was no mere sophistry. He really believed it.
    “The twenty-first century will be the Century of Europe, one way or the other,” he would often declare by way of grandiose post-coital pillow talk, “and if we do not gain entry into Common Europe, the Germans will dominate everything, and the Soviet Union will become a Third World state. On the other hand, a Europe that
included
the Soviet Union would inevitably become the dominant center of a new world order in which
we
, not the Germans, would be first among equals. Those Pamyat muzhiks call themselves Russian nationalists, but like the dimwits they are, they fail to understand that Russian destiny will be most gloriously served leading Europe from the inside, not standing outside the sweetshop window looking in.”
    And then, just when Sonya was thoroughly convinced that he really
was
a totally pompous ass, he would laugh, and take a swig of the raw Bulgarian