Journey to a Dark Age

I saw two motorcycles in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia. They were parked in a small square in the old part of town, which is tangled and charming—a neighborhood of partly wooden houses, not unlike the older slum sections of Istanbul. I didn’t pay much attention to the motorcycles at the time—I think they were painted yellow—but they were important, for they were the only ones I saw in ten days in the Soviet Union.

As such, they gave a partial answer to the question posed in a game I and the other journalists traveling on the same junket played. Albert Jay Nock once wondered how one would know if one were living in a Dark Age. Our game was similar: How, without any previous information or general knowledge, would you know you were visiting a totalitarian country?

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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I saw two motorcycles in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia. They were parked in a small square in the old part of town, which is tangled and charming—a neighborhood of partly wooden houses, not unlike the older slum sections of Istanbul. I didn’t pay much attention to the motorcycles at the time—I think they were painted yellow—but they were important, for they were the only ones I saw in ten days in the Soviet Union.

As such, they gave a partial answer to the question posed in a game I and the other journalists traveling on the same junket played. Albert Jay Nock once wondered how one would know if one were living in a Dark Age. Our game was similar: How, without any previous information or general knowledge, would you know you were visiting a totalitarian country?