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manding teacher. Among other things, he had taught his daughter that most of the world's ills were the fault of the United States and its laissez-faire capitalist system. During most of her adolescence and early adulthood, she believed it. There were few voices around her to deny it. |
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But by the time Mikhail Gorbachev appeared to speak for glasnost and perestroika, her beliefs were far more skeptical than they had been under the Red Vicar's tutelage. He had seen the Russian experiment as one grand step toward solving the world's economic ills, and was sure that any failures in that experiment stemmed not from the premise, but from human weakness in carrying out that utopian dream. What would he have thought of the shattering of the Soviet Empire and the emergence of the new Russia? It was no more desirable than the old, if what she read was true. |
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Jake Neville and her father had been two sides of a coin in their mutual passion for the perfect social contract. Both refused to take history or culture into account. Their grand design for the oppressed people of the world wiped all slates clean. Absolute equality in all things was their mantra, and in its pursuit, friends must be richly rewarded, enemies flayed. That had been the only sticking point in their otherwise smooth relationshipthey had disagreed on how to proceed. Anna's father dreamed one could reach the Grail by reasonteach, persuade, show and tell as children did. He excused the tyranny of Russian totalitarianism as only a small obstacle on the road to Paradise, to be discarded when all had learned to cast aside earthly vices for socialist virtues. Jake fully understood the uses of terror by Lenin and Stalin, and approved of it, albeit silently. The two had lived their lives in perpetual discontent, one an optimist, the other the blackest pessimist, both yearning for unachievable perfection. |
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The Vicar had as much as awarded Anna to Jake for his steadfast ideology, although she never understood just why Jake had accepted his prize. She was not at all sure why she, herself, had agreed to the marriage. Nowhere to go, nothing |
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