The morning fog over the pines at Zavidovo was thick enough to swallow the birch trees whole. George Bush adjusted the collar of his woolen sweater, staring out the floor-to-ceiling window of the state dacha. Outside, the air was bitter cold, but inside, the modern Soviet retreat burned with quiet, prosperous warmth. This wasn’t the decaying, bureaucratic empire his predecessors had anticipated decades ago. The Soviet Union in the winter of 1990 was modern, sleek, and dangerously confident—a market-socialist leviathan that had successfully retooled its central planning without surrendering an inch of its global reach.

The Echo at Tell es-Sultan

Setting: Jericho, c. 8,500 BCE. At the edge of the Jordan Valley sits Tell es-Sultan. Rising 28 feet above a ring of mud-brick homes stands the Tower of Jericho—humanity’s very first monumental watchtower.

Act I: “There Must Be Some Way Out of Here”

The night wind off the Judean desert smelled of parched earth and old wheat chaff. In the shadow of Jericho’s newly raised stone wall, two men huddled beside a dying hearth.