In the month before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I found myself attending a conference at Moscow’s Oktyabraskaya Hotel with the Polish Solidarity activist and writer Adam Michnik. Traditionally the preserve of the Communist Party elite, the hotel had one feature that stunned Adam and me, two veterans of the Soviet experience. It was the first place we had ever found the elusive Zubnaya Pasta, the Soviet-made toothpaste that was reputed to exist but was seldom seen by either foreigners or ordinary Russians. Small tubes of the stuff had been placed in each hotel room, along with shampoo that smelled like paint stripper, bottles of mineral water and vodka, and boxes of tissues that were clearly designed to complete the paint-stripping job started by the shampoo. The evidence of privileged Soviet plenty, to be found exclusively in a hotel usually reserved for visiting party chieftains, and the loss of imperial nerve symbolized by our welcome into these once-forbidden precincts, inspired Adam to muse on the imminent fall of the third Rome.

It had long been a conceit of Russian nationalists and Slavophiles that after the fall of the first Rome to the barbarians in the fifth century a.d., and of the second Rome, Constantinople, to the Ottomans in 1453, Moscow was to be the heart of the third terrestrially sovereign Roman Empire. Now this third Rome was visibly falling, Adam noted, even as he hailed the emergence, far to the west, of a new Caesar who had summoned into existence a fourth Rome. Arma virumque cano, Adam declaimed, and dedicated to the newly retired president Ronald Reagan and his rearmament program those opening words of the Aeneid: "I sing of arms and the man."

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