Scott Shane: In Russia, Echoes of Revolution

THE memorial stone is still there, across from the old K.G.B. headquarters, the handsome building where in the 1930s thousands of people were shot in the basement as trucks roared their engines to cover the noise.

“To the Memory,” the inscription reads, “of the Millions of Victims of the Totalitarian Regime.”

I was a reporter in the crowd on a crisp October afternoon in 1990 at the dedication of the gray granite boulder, brought from the birthplace of the Soviet prison camp system on the White Sea. A 90-year-old survivor of the gulag prison system spoke, and hundreds of people filed by, solemnly placing roses or carnations....

For anyone who covered the slow-motion collapse of Communism here, this moment feels familiar. Then, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s experiment in modernizing the Soviet system began to run out of control, security officials were deeply uncertain about how to respond to the proliferating street demonstrations....

Now the younger generation, for whom the Gorbachev years are but a childhood memory, has taken on a task greater than merely explaining to Mr. Putin that it is not his alone to decide when he goes. Many Russians believe they have outgrown Mr. Putin’s paternalism and deserve a truly competitive political culture that suits a civilized, prosperous country.

Getting there will undoubtedly be a struggle. What seems certain now is that history’s clock is ticking for the “managed democracy” of Vladimir Putin, as it once did for the Communist order of Vladimir Lenin. The Lubyanka may end up as just a museum after all.