The Next Big Socialist Experiment Won't Start in Russia

In the 1920s, my grandmother's last name, Dobrodeeva, was a burden: It betrayed her as a descendant of the clergy, a second-class citizen viewed with suspicion anywhere she tried to get a job or get into college. In the village where she was born 10 years before the revolution, a deacon's daughter, the Bolsheviks knocked the crosses off his church, and its priest eventually disappeared into the labor camp system. Grandma, though, always told me -- a skeptical Moscow kid -- that, but for the revolution, she'd still be living in that village; she'd never have become a neurologist or married my grandfather, a Jewish engineer whose name she'd happily taken to hide her churchy roots.

"It mixed things up," grandma said of the revolution, "so some people were lifted up who were not supposed to rise, and some people met who weren't supposed to meet, including us."