Read "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow.
There on the third of January 1928, the historians tell us, was the launch of the First Five-Year Plan-that initiative which would begin the transformation of Russia from a nineteenth-century agrarian society into a twentieth-century industrial power. There on the seventeenth of November 1929, Nikolai Bukharin, founding father, editor of Pravda, and last true friend of the peasant, was outmaneuvered by Stalin and ousted from the Politburo-clearing the way for a return to autocracy in all but name. And there on the twenty-fifth of February 1927, was the drafting of Article 58 of the Criminal Code-the net that would eventually ensnare us all.