ABSTRACT
Abel Agenbegyan, a rotund scholar whose bookshelves bulge with the works of Vladimir Lenin and Milton Friedman, is representative of the generation of intellectuals and party reformers who were inspired by the brief liberalizing "thaw" of the Nikita Khrushchev era of the late 1950s. They are the leaders of both the intelligentsia and the liberal, reformist wing of the Communist Party—the "perestroika army." Scholars such as Agenbegyan and party officials such as Mikhail Gorbachev survived the post-Khrushchev era of "stagnation" under Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s and early '80s by leading double lives, working quietly on their plans and dreams, always hoping that a period of reform would come. The world knows a great deal about the brave Soviet disidents, prophetic figures such as Andrei Sakharov, who insisted on essential human rights and values in the 1960s and '70s despite the unimaginable pressures of the KGB and the party apparatus.
