Their private life was happy but their public life was not. The diehards in the Kremlin only pretended to accept the Czechoslovakia compromise. As soon as Kosygin and Dimka got back from Prague the conservatives went to work to undermine the agreement, pressing for an invasion that would crush Dubcek and his reforms. The argument raged through June and July in the heat of Moscow and in the Black Sea breezes at the dachas to which the Communist Party elite migrated for their summer holidays.

For Dimka this was not really about Czechoslovakia. It was about his son and the world in which he would grow up. In fifteen years Grisha would be at university; in twenty he would be working; in twenty-five he might have children of his own. Would Russia have a better system, something like Dubcek’s idea of Communism with a human face? Or would the Soviet Union still be a tyranny in which the unchallengeable authority of the party was brutally enforced by the KGB?

Infuriatingly Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary, sat on the fence. Dimka had come to despise him. Terrified of being caught on the losing side, Brezhnev would never make up his mind until he knew which way the collective decision was likely to go. He had no vision, no courage, no plan for making the Soviet Union a better country. He was no leader.

The conflict came to a head at a two-day meeting of the Politburo starting on Thursday, August 15. As always, the formal meeting consisted mostly of polite interchanges of platitudes, while the real battles were fought outside.

It was in the plaza that Dimka had his face-off with Yevgeny Filipov, standing in the sunshine outside the yellow-and-white palace of the senate building among the parked cars and waiting limousines. “Look at the KGB reports from Prague,” Filipov said. “Counterrevolutionary student rallies! Clubs where the overthrow of Communism is openly discussed! Secret weapons caches!”

“I don’t believe all the stories,” Dimka said. “True, there is discussion of reform, but the dangers are being exaggerated by the failed leaders of the past who are now being pushed aside.” The truth was that Andropov, the hard-line head of the KGB, was fabricating sensational intelligence reports to bolster the conservatives; but Dimka was not foolhardy enough to say so out loud.

Dimka had a source of reliable intelligence: his twin sister. Tanya was in Prague, sending carefully noncommittal articles to TASS and, at the same time, supplying Dimka and Kosygin with reports saying that Dubcek was a hero to all Czechs except the old party apparatchiks.

It was almost impossible for people to get at the truth in a closed society. Russians told so many lies. In the Soviet Union almost every document was deceitful: production figures, foreign policy assessments, police interviews with suspects, economic forecasts. Behind their hands people murmured that the only true page in the newspaper was the one with the radio and television programs.

“I can’t tell which way it’s going to go,” Natalya said to Dimka on Thursday night. She still worked for Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. “All the signals from Washington say President Johnson will do nothing if we invade Czechoslovakia. He has too many problems of his own—riots, assassinations, Vietnam, and a presidential election.”