Roman’s reverie touches on real, specific landmarks of the late-Soviet reform movement. The Interregional Group of Deputies, formed in 1989 within the newly semi-democratic Congress of People’s Deputies, brought together reformist figures including Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin to push for an end to one-party rule. Memorial is a human rights and historical-memory organization, founded in 1989 to document Soviet-era political repression, still operating (with periods of state harassment) into the 21st century. Sergei Stankevich was a prominent young reformist politician and Moscow city official in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a familiar face at exactly this kind of rally. The «million-strong rally at Luzhniki» refers to a series of massive pro-democracy demonstrations held at Luzhniki Stadium in 1990–91, among the largest public gatherings in Soviet history; the «barricades at the White House» refers to the August 1991 coup attempt, when thousands of Muscovites gathered to defend the Russian parliament building against a hardline Communist takeover, an event widely seen as the final death blow to the USSR. That this same hall, two years later, is being stripped of its podium and turned into interview space for a shady import-export scheme is exactly the kind of quiet, unremarked-upon irony the novel keeps returning to.