1992 trek antelope 800

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Trek 800 Bike Bike 1998 or Older

USER REVIEWS

The bike is super reliable. The only issue we have ever had is the brakes need adjusting, and maybe the rims, but that is to be expected on a 25 year old bike.

The v brake setup needs to be adjusted because they will slowly move back and forth and sometimes rub on the rim.

Our Trek Antelope 800 was a wedding gift that my parents purchased when they got married, they got it as a Christmas present. Our 1993 Antelope 800 has over 6,000 miles on it, and is still rolling. Trek bicycles are built for quality and reliability, and I will be keeping my Antelope 800 for years to come. I am purchasing an 820 in December, and I am so excited for the matte black color. By the way, the green on the Antelope is awesome!

Dependable, smooth, easy to look at.

non from my point of view

My grandfather bought this bike new in 96' gave it to me in 98' to take to college. I have been riding it ever since. The only thing I have ever replaced are tubes and tires. I changed out the old knobby tires for some smooth road tires. Always shifts smooth and rides straight. I have always kept it in a garage or basment. No rust at all. I just took it into the trek store for its first ever tune up, cleaning and lube in 15 years. It now looks and rides like it is brand new. I thought about upgrading to a new Trek FX 7.1, but this bike just rides so nice I cant do it and after 15 years I have become a little attached. Best Bike i have ever owned. It would have to be destroyed or stolen for me to get a new one. This is a very solid well built bike. Thanks for the 15 years of fun Trek, looking forward to 15 more.

I like my Trek Antelope 800. It was bought in 1991 and now it's 2012. The bike frame is tough and many people who know about bikes have all commented on the excellent welding job and how it's not visible. My bike has endured a house fire and all the rubber and plastic pieces had to be replaced. I live in Montreal Canada and i ride all year round, summer and winter. In 1991, the store was saying the bike usually sells for $800. but we bought two because they were having a sale and were selling each bike for half price at $400. This bike has been to hell and back. I wore out the derailleur and front crank twice. I am on my third chain. I wore out the hand grips twice. Both wheels had to be replaced because the bearings were finished and the wheels got warped after years of hard riding. I bought higher handle bars because i dislike the high-seat low-handle bars idea. I put fenders on the bike and a rack in the back for saddle-bag and i use it for shopping and everything.

The only weakness i can think off were the forks that had to be changed once. What had happened is i saw a cute woman and i was not looking where i was riding and a i hit a car bumper waiting at a red light. I wasn't going fast at all but the result was that my front tire was touching the frame after the hit. Another time, the goose neck cracked inside. But these two incidents happened only after i had the bike for year and years. The gear changer for the crack side of the gears just recently lost it's 1 2 3 dial, but the gears still change alright. The bike is much lighter than most CCM and Supercycle bikes.

Great bike for 1991.I am sure there are better bike nowadays but i see the welding is very noticeable on most bikes i look at these days.

Strong Frame, Good Quality Components, Nimble Handling

No Suspension

I bought this bike in 1997 and got a discount off of the MSRP. I rode the S?$# out of this bike on the forest preserve trails for 5 years, and then stored it for 8 in my unheated garage. When I pulled it out to start getting some exersise again, all it needed was a good cleaning, air in the tires, and some minor adjustments. Wanted a suspension bike since I am getting older (50) and picked up a 1997 Y5 cheap. Gave the 800 Sport to my sister and she is still riding it.

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Trek 800 (A Detailed Review)

Photo of a blue and black Trek800 on a white background.

First introduced in 1987 and produced until 2003, the Trek 800 is a classic mountain bike that has stood the test of time. While it may not have all the bells and whistles of modern bikes, the Trek 800 is a great option for entry-level riders or those on a budget.

One of the standout features of the Trek 800 is its 21-speed drivetrain, which allows for smooth and efficient shifting. With a broad gear range, you can easily navigate diverse terrain and find the pedaling speed that suits you best.

The bike’s rigid steel frame with a TIG-welded design also provides a comfortable ride, even on rough roads or steep inclines. Additionally, the Trek 800 came equipped with reliable components such as Shimano parts, making it a great choice for cruising any terrain.

Key Takeaways:

Classic Mountain Bike Choice: The Trek 800 is a classic mountain bike that has been around for decades, known for its durability and reliability.
Standout Features: The bike’s standout features include a 21-speed drivetrain, allowing smooth shifting, and a rigid steel frame for a comfortable ride on various terrains.
Versatile All-Terrain Bike: Designed for entry-level riders and experienced ones alike, the Trek 800 is suitable for different terrains like dirt, gravel, and pavement due to its comfortable riding position and suspension fork.
Affordable Quality: Priced around $300, the Trek 800 offers good value for money, thanks to its high-quality components and durable steel frame.
Commute and Mountain Riding: The bike’s design and components make it suitable for both commuting and mountain biking. It offers a comfortable ride, wide tires for traction, and powerful brakes.
Durability and Quality: The Trek 800 is built to withstand rough terrain with its high-quality steel frame and reliable components. It’s a durable choice for various skill levels.
Maintenance and Accessories: Regular maintenance tips include pre-ride checks, cleaning, tire pressure checks, lubrication, brake and gear maintenance, and proper storage. The bike also comes with accessories to enhance the riding experience.

Overview of Trek 800

The Trek 800 is a popular mountain bike that has been around for over three decades. It is a part of the Trek 800 bike family that includes different variations, such as the Trek 800 Sport, Trek 800 Antelope, and Trek 800 Mountain Track. The bike is designed for entry-level riders who want to get into mountain biking or for more experienced riders who are looking for a secondary bike.

One of the standout features of the Trek 800 is its durable and reliable frame. It is made of high-quality steel that can withstand rough terrain and harsh weather conditions. The bike also features precise gearing that allows for smooth and efficient shifting, making it easier to climb hills and navigate through tricky trails.

The Trek 800 is an all-terrain bike (ATB) that is suitable for a variety of different terrains, including dirt, gravel, and pavement. It has a comfortable and upright riding position that reduces strain on your back and neck, making it ideal for long rides. The bike also comes with a suspension fork that absorbs shocks and vibrations, providing a smoother ride.

If you are looking for an affordable mountain bike that is still high quality, the Trek 800 is a great option. Its retail price is around $300, which is reasonable considering its features and durability. With proper maintenance, the Trek 800 can last for many years, making it a great investment for anyone who loves mountain biking.

Features and Specifications

When it comes to features and specifications, the Trek 800 mountain bike offers a great balance of quality and affordability. In this section, we will take a closer look at the various components that make up this bike.

Frame and Construction

The Trek 800 features a sturdy steel frame, which is known for its durability and strength. The frame is tig-welded, ensuring a solid construction that can withstand the wear and tear of regular use. Additionally, the bike’s design is simple yet stylish, making it a popular choice for both beginners and experienced riders.

Wheels and Tires

The Trek 800 comes with 26-inch wheels, which are a common size for mountain bikes. The tires are designed to provide a comfortable ride on a variety of terrains, from smooth pavement to rocky trails. The bike’s wheels and tires are also available in a range of colors, allowing you to customize your ride to your liking.

Brakes and Gears

The Trek 800 features an aluminum linear-pull brakeset, which provides reliable stopping power in a variety of conditions. The bike also comes with a 7-speed or 21-speed drivetrain, depending on the model you choose. The shift levers and rear derailleur are typically made by Shimano or SRAM, with models like the Shimano C051 and SRAM 5.0 being common choices.

Comfort and Design

The Trek 800 is designed to provide a comfortable ride, with features like a cushioned saddle and ergonomic handlebar. The bike also comes with a suspension fork, which helps absorb shocks and bumps on the trail. The seatpost is adjustable, allowing you to find the perfect riding position for your body type.

Performance and Versatility

The Trek 800 mountain bike is a versatile bike that can handle various terrains, from smooth pavement to rough trails. Its sturdy steel frame and reliable components make it a powerful bike that can handle the rigors of mountain biking and commuting alike.

When it comes to mountain biking, the Trek 800 is a great entry-level bike. Its precise gearing and reliable performance make it easy to handle on rough terrain. The bike’s powerful brakes provide excellent stopping power, which is essential when navigating steep descents. With its sturdy frame and reliable components, the Trek 800 can handle the bumps and jolts of rough trails with ease.

For commuting, the Trek 800 is a reliable and versatile bike. Its sturdy frame and comfortable seating position make it ideal for long rides on rough roads. The bike’s wide tires provide excellent traction on a variety of surfaces, from smooth pavement to gravel paths. With its reliable components and powerful brakes, the Trek 800 is a great choice for commuting in all weather conditions.

The Trek 800’s versatility doesn’t end there. It’s a great multi-terrain bike that can handle a variety of surfaces, from paved roads to light off-road trails. The bike’s wide tires and sturdy frame make it a great choice for exploring new paths and taking on new challenges. Whether you’re cruising through the city or exploring the countryside, the Trek 800 is a reliable and versatile bike that can handle it all.

Durability and Quality

When it comes to durability and quality, the Trek 800 mountain bike is a great choice. The bike is made of high-quality materials, which gives it a long-lasting and durable frame. The frame is made of steel, which is known for its high tensile strength, making it a sturdy and reliable option for riders of all skill levels.

The Trek 800 mountain bike is designed to take on rough and challenging terrain with ease. The bike’s durable frame can withstand the wear and tear of the toughest trails, making it a great option for those who want a bike that can handle anything.

In addition to its sturdy frame, the Trek 800 also features high-quality components that are designed to last. The bike’s gears and brakes are made of durable materials that can withstand heavy use, ensuring that the bike remains reliable and safe to ride for years to come.

Affordability of Trek 800

If you are looking for an affordable mountain bike, the Trek 800 is a great option. With its affordable price, you can get a high-quality bike without breaking the bank. The Trek 800 is perfect for entry-level riders who want to get into mountain biking or for more experienced riders who are looking for a secondary bike.

At a retail price of around $300, the Trek 800 is an excellent value for money. It is one of the most affordable mountain bikes on the market, making it accessible to a wide range of people. The low price does not mean that the bike is of low quality, though. The Trek 800 has many features that make it a great choice for anyone on a budget.

One of the reasons why the Trek 800 is so affordable is that it features a rigid fork, which is less expensive than a suspension fork. While a suspension fork can provide a more comfortable ride on rough terrain, a rigid fork is more than adequate for most riders. It also means that there are fewer moving parts to maintain, which can save you money on repairs in the long run.

Another way that the Trek 800 keeps its price down is by using a steel frame instead of an aluminum one. While aluminum frames are lighter and more expensive, steel frames are more durable and can handle more abuse. The Trek 800’s steel frame ensures that it can withstand the rigors of off-road riding without breaking the bank.

Components and Accessories

When it comes to components and accessories, the Trek 800 mountain bike has a lot to offer. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key features.

The Trek 800 comes with a range of high-quality components designed to enhance your riding experience. The bike features a crankset that is both lightweight and durable, allowing you to power through tough terrain with ease. The headset is also of high quality, providing a smooth and stable ride.

In addition, the Trek 800 comes with a set of pedals that are designed to provide great traction and control. You can choose between plastic pedals or nylon platform pedals, depending on your preferences.

The hubs on the Trek 800 are another standout feature. They are built to last, with stainless steel spokes that provide excellent strength and durability. This means you can ride with confidence, knowing that your bike is up to the task.

Accessories

When it comes to accessories, the Trek 800 has everything you need to hit the trails. The bike comes with a range of accessories designed to make your ride more comfortable and enjoyable.

One of the standout accessories is the bike’s suspension system. This system is designed to absorb shock and provide a smoother ride, even on rough terrain. This means you can ride for longer without feeling fatigued.

The Trek 800 also comes with a range of other accessories, including a water bottle holder, a kickstand, and a rear rack. These accessories are designed to make your ride more convenient and practical.

Maintenance and Care

Maintaining your Trek 800 is essential to ensure that it remains in good condition and lasts for a long time. Here are some tips to help you keep your bike in top shape:

Pre-ride check: Before every ride, perform a quick check of your bike’s performance. This will give you an idea of what adjustments you need to make before riding and what may require a deeper look.
Regular cleaning: Clean your bike regularly with a rag or soap and water if it’s too dirty. Inspect the frame and components for signs of wear, such as cracks. Clean and wax the frame to protect the paint/finish (not necessary on bare titanium frames).
Tire pressure: Check your tire pressure regularly and add air if needed. Proper tire pressure ensures a smooth and safe ride.
Lubrication: Lubricate your bike’s chain and other moving parts regularly to keep them running smoothly and prevent rust. Use a bike-specific lubricant for best results.
Brakes: Check your brakes regularly to ensure they are functioning properly. Replace worn brake pads and adjust the brake cable tension as needed.
Gears: Keep your bike’s gears in good condition by regularly cleaning and lubricating the chain, derailleur, and cassette. Adjust the gears as needed to ensure smooth shifting.
Storage: Store your bike in a dry, cool place to prevent rust and damage. Use a bike cover to protect it from dust and debris.

FAQ: Trek 800

What is the difference between trek 700 and 800 carbon.

The Trek 700 and 800 carbon bikes are both high-end road bikes, but the Trek 800 is a step up from the 700 in terms of features. The Trek 800 has a lighter frame, better components, and a more advanced carbon fiber construction.

What type of bike is a Trek 800?

The Trek 800 is a mountain bike that is designed for off-road use. It is a versatile bike that can be used for a variety of activities, including trail riding, commuting, and leisurely rides around town.

What year was the Trek 800 made?

The Trek 800 was first introduced in the 1990s and has since become an iconic bike in the mountain biking community. However, the specific year of production may vary depending on the model and edition.

What are the features of the Trek 800 Antelope?

The Trek 800 Antelope is a classic model of the Trek 800 series. It features a lightweight steel frame, 21-speed Shimano gearing, and a suspension fork for a smooth ride. It also has a comfortable saddle and a range of accessories, including a kickstand and water bottle holder.

What is the price of the Trek 800 Sport?

The price of the Trek 800 Sport can vary depending on the location and the condition of the bike. However, it is generally considered to be an affordable option for a high-quality mountain bike, with prices ranging from $100 to $500.

Is the Trek 800 a good mountain bike brand?

The Trek 800 is a reputable and reliable brand of mountain bikes that has been popular among riders for decades. While it may not have all of the latest features and technologies, it is known for its sturdy construction, wide gear range, and affordable price point.

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Andre Neves

I've been riding bikes for 30 of my 35 years. Nothing gives me more pleasure than grabbing my Enduro bike and take on the mountains. Learn more about me here.

1992 Trek Bikes 800 Base

Trek 800 Antelope

Commuter/touring bike. Cro-moly frame 1992. Nothing special, but it's a pretty bomb-proof bike

Frame: 4130 Cro-Moly, double butted

Fork/Headset: Stock/ Cro moly

Crankset/Bottom Bracket: FSA Comet Triple, 44/34/22, external bearing BB

Pedals: Shimano PD-M545 clipless w/ platform

Drivetrain/Cog/Chainring/Chain: 11-32 SRAM 9 speed Cassette, SRAM PC-971 9 speed chain

Derailleurs/Shifters: Shimano CX60 FD, Shimano XTR 90's RD, Shimano bar end shifters (9 speed)

Handlebars/Stem: anatomic drop bars, Cannondale 90mm stem (unknown rise)

Saddle/Seatpost: WTB Speed V saddle, Titec 26.8mm

Brakes: Tektro CR720 centerpull cantilevers, Tektro A200 levers, Kool Stop Salmon pads

Front Wheel/Hub/Tire: Cheap JoyTech hub laced to a cheap rim, double wall 36h, 4 cross, lacing Schwalbe Marathon Pro 26x1.5

Rear Wheel/Hub/Tire: Avenir Joytec/Weinmann XC-260 36H, 3 cross lacing, JoyTech hub Schwalbe Marathon Pro 26x1.5

Accessories: Planet Bike Blaze 650 XLR (front light), Planet Bike SuperFlash Stealth (rear light) , Bontrager rear rack, occasionally I'll take off the SKS fenders.

More Info: This bike is mine.

Added over 10 years ago by JoWilson . Last updated about 8 years ago.

40degreerake says:

Don't let your antelope.

Posted almost 7 years ago

4130 , 56cm , commuter , cro-moly , steel , tektro , trek

View JoWilson's Profile

Antelope of the Now: Trek 800

Trek Antelope 800, gold, 42 cm, 15 speed, 26″ wheels, quick release seat & front wheel, new Kenda Kwest tires, center pull brakes, Shimano Alivio derailleur in back, SunTour α 3000 derailleur in front. $300

Trek has a reputation for being both sturdy & nimble; this mountain bike has the additional attraction of an eye-catching shade of gold/yellow very close to National School Bus Glossy Yellow . So you’ll be visible & stylish in traffic or plummeting down the slopes. Some other grace notes distinguish this ride: note the clean drive train & the classy chrome shield protecting the right chain stay.

Our research has revealed that this model has horizontal pupils, even-toed heels & a ruminating gut.

Cycling made Simple.

Made By Cyclists

Trek 800: All in One Review

September 15, 2023

‍ Key Takeaways

Versatile and durable, the Trek 800 is a reliable all-terrain bike for various riding styles.
Its comfortable design and adjustable features make it suitable for many riders.
Its safety innovations enhance performance and the rider’s safety in various terrains.

This article may contain affiliate links where we earn a commission from qualifying purchases.

‍ Here’s the ultimate Trek 800 review! It addresses all your questions and concerns. This is to help you find your perfect ride with our comprehensive analysis!

The Trek 800 is a proper bike that offers a combination of simplicity, sturdy construction, and reliability at an affordable price point. It features a rigid steel frame with a TIG-welded design, 21 speeds, and reliable Shimano components, allowing riders to tackle various terrains confidently.

To provide a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the Trek 800, I’ve thoroughly researched credible sources, testimonials, and expert opinions in the cycling world. I’ll equip you with the relevant information you need to make an informed decision as you venture into the exciting world of mountain biking. With my personal experience, knowledgeable approach, and unbiased perspective, I’ll guide you toward the best bike for your needs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

‍ Trek 800 History

By 2003, the Trek 800 had already established a reputation for its durability, reliability, and affordability. It was designed as an entry-level mountain bike with a strong and long-lasting frame, making it suitable for various terrains and conditions.

The 2003 Trek 800 showcased major improvements in components and design, catering to the evolving needs of mountain bikers.

Materials and Design

In this all-in-one review of the Trek 800, we’ll cover its materials and design. We’ll focus on its frame types, color variations, and other essential components.

Frame Types

The Trek 800 is designed with a rigid steel frame that provides durability and strength for a comfortable riding experience. For those who prefer a lighter option, there is also a version of this bike with a lightweight aluminum frame.

The steel frame is made from high-quality materials like stainless steel and cro-moly frame, ensuring the bike remains sturdy and resistant to damage despite its low-cost construction.

The rigid steel frame and TIG-welded design of the Trek 800 provide a powerful and comfortable ride, even on rough roads or steep inclines and bumps. On top of that, the reliable components, such as 21 speeds and Shimano parts, make this bike versatile enough to cruise through any terrain.

The Trek 800's well-rounded design is praised for its durability and affordability, making it a great choice for an entry-level mountain bike.

Color Variations

The Trek 800 offers a variety of color options to suit the personal preferences of every rider, with different combinations of frame, fork, and component colors and paint options. Some available colors include classic black, vibrant red, and cool blue shades.

Components and Specifications

In this section, we'll dive into the details of the Trek 800's components and specifications. This all-in-one review will focus on the bike's brake and suspension systems, touching on aspects like Shimano components, gear shifters, tires, and more.

Brake System

The Trek 800 employs an alloy pull cable braking system, which provides adequate stopping power for most riders. These brakes are reliable and relatively easy to maintain, making them a good choice for an entry-level bike.

While they may not be as powerful as disc brakes, the new cables offer a more than sufficient stopping ability for tackling diverse terrains.

Suspension System

One key aspect of the Trek 800 is its rigid fork suspension system, which sets it apart from more advanced bikes like the Trek 4300 . The rigid fork offers a simple design, contributing to the bike's overall durability.

Additionally, the Trek 800 comes with 26-inch wheels, providing an agile and smooth ride. These wheels have spokes that connect to the outer rim and a chain that transfers power from the rider’s pedaling to the rear wheel.

The suspension system may be less sophisticated than bikes with more advanced shocks. Still, it remains a reliable and efficient setup for those just starting in the world of mountain biking.

Performance and Comfort

The Trek 800 MTB offers an impressive blend of performance, riding comfort, and capability suitable for riders of different skill levels. We’ll discuss its performance and comfort, focusing on its riding comfort and the bike's capability.

Riding Comfort

The Trek 800 provides a comfortable ride for its users. Its suspension system is designed to handle various terrains, ensuring the cyclist experiences smoothness even when surfaces get rough.

In addition, this bike offers a padded saddle, ensuring a comfortable ride for beginners and more experienced riders.

Bike's Capability

When it comes to the bike's capability, the Trek 800 is known for its reliable performance. This bike's quality frame and rigid fork ensure durability and stability on the trails.

Another noteworthy feature is the use of resin components that contribute to the bike's overall lightweight design, enhancing maneuverability and speed. With these attributes, it's evident that the Trek 800 can handle the demands of various cycling scenarios while maintaining rider comfort.

Value and Affordability

In this section, we'll discuss the Trek 800, its value and affordability, and how it compares to older bikes in its price range.

Comparison with Other Bikes

To help you compare the Trek 800 with other bikes in its class, here’s a detailed table:

Price Range

The Trek 800 comes at an approximately $300 retail price, making it an affordable and practical choice for many biking enthusiasts. Its simple yet effective design and reliable performance ensure riders get value for their money, particularly beginners or those looking for a secondary bike.

Compared to other bikes in the market, the Trek 800 is a cost-effective option, providing a wide gear range and a sturdy steel frame. The low price of the Trek 800 makes it an attractive choice, proving that high-quality and affordability can indeed go hand in hand.

Advantages of Trek 800

The Trek 800 is known for its simplicity, quality frame, and reliability. The bike is durable, holding up to three times more than your average road bike.

This durability allows you to take longer trips and ride in extreme weather conditions without breaking down. With its smaller wheel sizes, the Trek 800 offers better maneuverability and easier acceleration, making it a great entry-level bike for men and women.

Disadvantages of Trek 800

While the Trek 800 has earned a reputation for its durability and reliability, there are some drawbacks to consider.

Although its tire width provides better agility, it can limit your ability to roll over larger obstacles when riding off-road. Additionally, the Trek 800 mountain bike might not be suited for those seeking a good bike with advanced specifications.

Different Trek 800 Models

When it comes to the Trek 800 series, various models are available to suit different preferences and needs. We’ll focus on two popular models from this brand - the Trek 800 Antelope and the Trek 800 Sport.

These bicycles come with unique features designed to cater to different types of cyclists, so we'll examine each of them in detail.

Trek 800 Antelope

The Trek 800 Antelope has garnered a reputation as a durable and reliable mountain bike among riders. A key reason for its popularity is its high-tensile strength frame, built to withstand harsh outdoor conditions while maintaining optimal comfort levels during rides. This model offers the following features:

Strong steel frames for enhanced durability
Rigid front suspension forks for improved stability on rugged terrain
High-quality Shimano components and a rear derailleur for smooth gear shifting
Large cargo capacity, making it suitable for backpacking trips

Trek 800 Sport

The Trek 800 Sport model is designed for riders who desire a versatile bike that can handle various cycling activities. It’s equipped with numerous features that provide an enjoyable and comfortable experience on various terrains, including:

Lightweight aluminum frame for improved maneuverability and speed
Suspension forks for better handling on bumpy roads
A gear shifter to cater to different riding styles and conditions
Disc brakes for consistent stopping power in all weather conditions

Cycling Safety Innovations of Trek 800

The Trek 800 is an all-in-one versatile bike that has gained popularity among cycling enthusiasts for its ruggedness and dependability. In this section, we'll delve into the safety innovations that set the Trek 800 apart from its competitors, making it an excellent choice for riders who value exceptional design and reliable performance.

Starting with its build, the Trek 800 is designed with a TIG-welded Chromoly frame that offers lightweight properties and resistance to rust, ensuring the bike's longevity, especially while riding on an uneven Trek mountain track. This lightweight frame contributes to better handling and maneuverability, enhancing the rider's safety.

Also, the Trek 800's braking system adds to its safety advantage. Power while descending or stopping on slippery surfaces is crucial, and the Trek 800 provides riders with effective and reliable braking that instills confidence and security on unpredictable trails.

Furthermore, the Trek 800 has Bontrager Connection tires, which have excellent traction on various surfaces. This ensures proper grip and stability while cycling, thus reducing the risk of accidents and enhancing the overall safety of the rider.

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About THE AUTHOR

Danny Lawson

Mountain biking is more than just a hobby for me - it's a way of life. I love the challenge and excitement that comes with it, and I'm always pushing myself to go faster and ride harder. Some people might think that mountain biking is dangerous, but I see it as the only way to live.

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90s Trek MTBs - Steel frames, rigid forks, 26" wheels

Full list of steel, rigid fork mountain bike models Trek made between 1990 and 1999, grouped by year, containing details on frames and main components for easy reference.

Based on riding style, build level and performance, Trek offered these in two series. The 9XX series , called Single Track , consists of a range of race, competition and performance bikes, aimed at pro riders and serious off-road enthusiasts. The 8XX series , called Antelope until 1993 and Mountain Track from 1994, covers a range of multipurpose models, from commuting and recreation to trail and light mountain biking.

1990 View catalog

Trek 990 Single Track (1990)

Trek 970 Single Track (1990)

Trek 950 Single Track (1990)

Trek 930 Single Track (1990)

Trek 850 Antelope (1990)

Trek 830 Antelope (1990)

Trek 820 Antelope (1990)

Trek 800 Antelope (1990)

1991 view catalog.

Trek 990 Single Track Competition (1991)

Trek 970 Single Track Competition (1991)

Trek 950 Single Track Performance (1991)

Trek 930 Single Track Performance (1991)

Trek 850 Antelope Performance (1991)

Trek 830 Antelope Mountain Sport (1991)

Trek 820 Antelope Trail Performance (1991)

Trek 800 Antelope Sport Trail (1991)

1992 view catalog.

Trek 970 SingleTrack Competition (1992)

Trek 950 SingleTrack Performance (1992)

Trek 930 SingleTrack Performance (1992)

Trek 850 Antelope Performance (1992)

Trek 830 Antelope Trail Performance (1992)

Trek 820 Antelope Sport Trail (1992)

Trek 800 Antelope Sport Trail (1992)

1993 view catalog.

Trek 970 SingleTrack Competition Race (1993)

Trek 950 SingleTrack Performance (1993)

Trek 930 SingleTrack Performance (1993)

Trek 830 Antelope Performance Trail (1993)

Trek 820 Antelope Sport Trail (1993)

Trek 800 Antelope Sport (1993)

1994 view catalog.

Trek 970 SingleTrack Competition (1994)

Trek 950 SingleTrack Performance (1994)

Trek 930 SingleTrack Performance (1994)

Trek 920 SingleTrack Performance (1994)

Trek 850 Mountain Track Performance (1994)

Trek 830 Mountain Track Performance Trail

Trek 820 Mountain Track Sport Trail (1994)

Trek 800 Mountain Track Sport (1994)

1995 view catalog.

Trek 990 SingleTrack ZX Series Competition (1995)

Trek 970 SingleTrack ZX Series Performance

Trek 950 SingleTrack Performance (1995)

Trek 930 SingleTrack Performance (1995)

Trek 850 Mountain Track Sport (1995)

Trek 830 Mountain Track Sport (1995)

Trek 820 Mountain Track Recreation (1995)

Trek 800 Mountain Track Recreation (1995)

1996 view catalog.

Trek 990 SingleTrack ZX Series Competition (1996)

Trek 970 SingleTrack ZX Series High Performance (1996)

Trek 950 SingleTrack High Performance (1996)

Trek 930 SingleTrack Performance (1996)

Trek 850 Mountain Track XC Enthusiast (1996)

Trek 830 Mountain Track XC Enthusiast (1996)

Trek 820 Mountain Track Recreation (1996)

Trek 800 Mountain Track Recreation (1996)

Trek 800 Sport Mountain Track Recreation (1996)

1997 view catalog.

Trek 930 SingleTrack XC Series Performance (1997)

Trek 850 Mountain Track XC Series Enthusiast (1997)

Trek 830 Mountain Track XC Series Enthusiast (1997)

Trek 820 Mountain Track Recreation (1997)

Trek 800 Mountain Track Recreation (1997)

Trek 800 Sport Mountain Track Recreation (1997)

1998 view catalog.

Trek 920 SingleTrack Performance (1998)

Trek 820 Mountain Track Enthusiast (1998)

Trek 800 Mountain Track Recreation (1998)

Trek 800 Sport Mountain Track Recreation (1998)

1999 view catalog.

Trek 820 Mountain Track Recreation (1999)

Trek 800 Mountain Track Recreation (1999)

Trek 800 Sport Mountain Track Recreation (1999)

Acronym for all terrain bike.

Trek's exclusive fork design.

A tube having different wall thicknesses along its length, while its diameter remains constant.

Low alloy steel with a medium carbon content, that gets its name from the primary alloying elements, chromium and molybendium. It has an excellent strength to weight ratio and is considerably stronger, harder more durable than mild carbon steel.

Trek's exclusive fork design using taper gauge tubing and provides a blade with more elasticity for better shock absoption.

The thickness of the tube at both ends is thicker than in the centre.

Shifting system, where part of the handlebar grip rotates back and forth, clicking into each gear.

Low alloy steel that can withstand significant stress before breaking or becoming deformed. The term 'tensile' refers to the amount of stress a material can endure before failing.

Steel tubing connected with socket-like sleeves, called lugs.

Shimano's multi-condition brake system with specialized shoes, levers and cables designed for enhanced stopping power in rain, mud and snow.

A house brand for Trek during the 80s and early 90s.

Optimal Dimension; Trek's large diameter, thin wall tubing design.

Oversize; Trek's large diameter, thin wall tubing design.

Shimano's oversize hub system designed to minimize wheel flex.

Shimano's under handlebar, two-finger shift system, giving riders the ability to downshift more than one gears in one stroke.

Brake lever system that lets riders adjust braking power modulation.

Shimano Integrated Shifting. Shift mechanism indents control cable advance for quick, precise gear changes without over-shifting.

Shimano Linear Response. Friction reducing levers, cables and calipers.

Japanese steel tubing manufacturer for bicycle frames.

A tube having a maller diameter at one end and a larger diameter on the other end.

Tungsten Inert Gas welding is an arc welding process that produces the weld with a non-consumable tungsten electrode.

Trek-designed components. The higher the number ona given component, the higher its performance level.

Three different wall thicknesses along the length.

American tubing manufacturer.

Special all-terrain tubing, developed to withstand demands of off-road cycling.

A lighter weight version of the AT frame set, featuring a triple-butted down tube.

Zero Excess; Trek's guiding principle of making stronger bikes with less material.

Bike tools you need while rebuilding an old mountain bike

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Trek 800 Review: Is It a Good Bike or Waste of Money in 2023?

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The Trek 800 is a popular mountain bike from the 20th century. It was first introduced in 1987, and production ended in 2003, so it’s an old bike.

The big question is: Is the Trek 800 a good bike?

Compared to modern standards, the Trek 800 is outdated. However, its benefits include simplicity, a quality steel frame, a wide gear range, and a low price. It’s possible to buy a used one for less than $100.

Do you want to learn more about this iconic bike? Let’s dive in!

Is Trek 800 a Good Bike?

Trek 800 was popular worldwide thanks to its simplicity, quality frame, and reliability. Unlike the Trek 4300 , it features a rigid fork.

It wasn’t cheap at a retail price of around $300, considering the average salary at the time.

It came in various sizes (13″, 15.5″, 17.5″, 19.5″, 21.5″…) and different colors, with slightly modified components each year.

Trek 800 was sold with rim brakes and in multiple options:

Trek 800 Sport
Trek 800 Antelope

However, details about their differences are not available. The Trek 800 Sport was also available in a step-through frame option, making it suitable for women and people with limited mobility.

The last generation of Trek 800 was released in 2003, and since then, it has been discontinued and replaced by newer models.

Pros and Cons of Trek 800

I summarized the pros and cons of Trek 800 below.

Pros of Trek 800

Quality and sturdy steel frame
Available for men and women
Comfortable geometry, allowing upright riding position

Cons of Trek 800

26-inch wheels
3X drivetrain (2X and 1X became more popular thanks to their simplicity)
Rigid front fork

The following section provides a detailed comparison of the features of the Trek 800 with those of modern mountain bikes . It will help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of the Trek 800 better.

Main Features of Trek 800

Let’s now dive deeper into Trek’s 800 components so you better understand its value.

Steel Frame

The frame is one of the most important components of any bike, and the Trek 800 featured a high-tensile steel and Cro-Moly frame.

Steel is a durable, affordable, and stiff material commonly used for low-end bikes .

However, the bike’s weight of around 13 kg (26 lbs) was pretty heavy, especially considering it had a rigid fork.

On the other hand, you didn’t have to worry about its durability because Trek 800 was designed to last and withstand a lot of abuse.

26-Inch Wheels

The Trek 800 was equipped with 26-inch wheels, which are nimble and allow for quick acceleration but are not as fast, stable, or comfortable as 27.5 or 29-inch wheels.

In today’s market, it’s rare to find adult mountain bikes with 26-inch wheels. They are primarily used for kids’ mountain bikes and dirt bikes.

Trek 800 on a field with a forrest behind

The trend in the market has shifted towards 27.5 and 29-inch wheels, which are more comfortable, stable, and faster. They may not accelerate as quickly, but they have many other advantages.

The following video showcases the sprint of different bike types (and wheel sizes) over various distances. Keep in mind that their gearing may differ. However, the video effectively demonstrates the quick acceleration of smaller wheels (BMX vs. MTB).

The Trek 800 combined Shimano, SRAM, and other 3rd party components.

Interestingly, some components were supplied by other manufacturers, such as SRAM, which supplied cassettes, Suntour forks, and cranks.

The Trek 800 had a narrow handlebar, no front suspension, and a wide saddle compared to today’s standards.

Most Trek 800 models had a 3×7spd drivetrain offering 21 gears, while some had a 3×8spd gearing.

In contrast, modern mountain bikes typically use 2X or 1X drivetrains for simplicity, lower weight, and less chance of cross-chaining.

However, the Trek 800 had similarities to today’s hybrid bikes due to its rigid fork and geometry. Hybrids still use 2X or 3X drivetrains, providing a wide gear range for various terrains.

One of the main downsides of the Trek 800 was the rigid fork. The only “suspension” came from its wide, high-volume tires.

Riding through rougher terrain required more caution. The Trek 820 was a later model that addressed this issue by including a suspension fork.

Overall, the Trek 800 was best suited for paved, dirt, and forest roads without many bumps.

Trek 800 Specifications

Below, I summarize the most important technical specifications. Remember, they differ based on the year:

Frame material: Steel
Weight: ±13kg (29lb) depending on frame size, brakes, and year made
Wheel size: 26-inch
Brakes: Rim
Groupset: Shimano Altus, Tourney
Gears: 3×7spd or 3×8spd
Colors: Differ based on the year

The Trek 800 is a budget-friendly mountain bike mainly produced in the last century. Despite its age, it still makes a good choice for those looking for an affordable MTB, thanks to its depreciation and low price.

Since it has already been discontinued, you may find good deals on websites like Craigslist or eBay. For a mint condition bike, aim for a price of up to $150; for a decent condition bike, look for a price under $100.

Additionally, you may want to check out Trek’s current mountain bike offerings. The Trek 820 , which also comes in a step-through option , is a mountain bike worth considering.

Trek 800 FAQ

If you’re searching for an affordable mountain bike , the Trek 800 is still a good option today. Look for one in mint condition for under $150 or in decent condition for under $100. Remember that it’s a mountain bike from the previous century, so it may not compare to today’s models, but it’s still useful for activities like commuting. For more information, be sure to read the entire article.

Trek 800 was made between 1987 and 2003.

Trek 800 weighs ±13 kg (29 lbs). Its weight differs based on its size and year made. Also, the Trek 800 with disc brakes is heavier than with rim brakes.

About The Author

Petr Minarik

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1992 Trek 800 Antelope

Serial: T1LB43144
Manufacturer: Trek
Model: 800 Antelope
Primary colors: Green
Frame size: 17IN
Frame Material: Steel

What Life Was Like on Moscow’s Streets After the USSR Collapsed

As we all know, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is no more. It has ceased to be. It has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is a late Union. Bereft of life, it is pushing up the daisies. It is an ex-Union. (It’s not just “resting,” either.) The landmass it formerly occupied is now taken up by new countries with old names, such as Russia, Ukraine (out, damned the!), Kazakhstan, and Byelorussia, which I half expect, once capitalism takes hold, to rename itself Sellhighrussia. Yet even though the corporeal and temporal actuality of the Soviet Union has ended, the Soviet Union is not nowhere. It has simply moved to a different plane of existence. It has fled to the realm of myth and mystery, of fright and fable, where it abides with other empires that must be imagined to he believed (whether or not they were ever real)—empires good and empires evil, empires like Atlantis, Ancient Rome, the Middle Kingdom, Oz, and the Third Reich.

Of course, even when it was alive the Soviet Union was a fabulous kingdom, a place of the blackest black magic. How could it have been otherwise? After all, here was a country founded upon a vast and elaborate fantasy, the fantasy of the Workers’ Suite, a fantasy sustained not only by the cruel and bloodsoaked apparatus of fear but also, and above all during its wickedest decades, by the blind goodwill of millions of believers within and without its borders. The literature of and about the Soviet Union was steeped in weird phantasmagoria. Almost every word of Soviet journalism was fiction disguised as fact; by the same token, any Soviet writer wishing to publish a bit of honest social analysis had to disguise his facts as fiction. Many of the books written in praise of the Soviet Union described an imaginary place. Some of the most eloquent attacks on it did likewise, albeit in a more conscious way—Zamyatin’s We , Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 . The most spookily on-target visual portrait of the pre-collapse USSR is Terry Gilliam’s great cult film Brazil . The movie has nothing directly to do with the Soviet Union (or with Brazil either), and I doubt that Gilliam had the Soviet Union in mind when he made it. He captured its essence all the same. It you want to know what the texture of this very odd country was like before the fall, see Brazil .

I’ve been here three times now. The first time, Moscow seemed to me less like a foreign city than an alien planet—a planet that had developed along amazingly similar lines to earth. This faraway planet, like our own, is populated by bilaterally symmetrical bipeds who, like us, garb themselves in clothing differentiated by gender, use four-wheel motorized vehicles for transport, live in boxlike structures, and consume grain-based products for both nourishment and recreation. They have equivalents of almost everything we have—shoes, newspapers, traffic lights—yet there is always something about these everyday items that makes them seem utterly strange. It’s hard to say which is more eerie, the resemblances or the differences. They have shops, for example, but the signs on the outside say harsh generic things—PRODUCTS, REPAIRS, MILK, PHOTO—and inside there are only drab, empty display cases and coiled lines of shuffling people. That was three years ago. It’s still basically the same, only now this exotically gray planet has begun to be colonized by earthlings.

Three years ago, there were still a few big signs of the COMRADES! WE ARE BUILDING COMMUNISM variety to be seen. On my second visit, a year and a half ago, I saw only one sign of this type—red background, block letters—but when I asked someone to translate it for me it turned out to say YOUNG PEOPLE! INVEST IN HIGH-YIELD SECURITIES! This time, the signs are advertising Mars candy bars, Hyundai cars, Panasonic electronics. The consistent thread is that all the signs, whether communist, perestroika-ist, or post-communist, advertise things that are either nonexistent or unavailable.

Some other changes. The lines at the state stores are longer than they were eighteen months ago, but elsewhere there is much more evidence of non-state commerce. The Metro corridors and the passageways under the broad Moscow avenues are lined with card tables where people sell books, magazines, scarves, flowers, chewing gum. cans of German beer. There are musicians on the subway, too—another absolutely new development. Homeless people, too—ditto. Three years ago the hot newspaper was Moscow News , which had emerged from decades as a weekly for tourists published by the Novosti Press Agency to become the voice of glasnost. A year and a half ago it was Commersant, a business weekly. Now it’s Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta ( The Independent ), a sober thrice-weekly broadsheet, and St. Petersburg’s Chas Pik ( Rush Hour ), a spunky afternoon daily. Three years ago, an American in Moscow felt utterly invulnerable. Now every foreigner knows someone who’s been mugged or burgled. But Moscow still feels a lot safer than New York.

If you have dollars and a few Russian-speaking friends to guide you, the Commonwealth of Independent States is, for the moment, a vacationer’s and shopper’s paradise. I traveled here on frequent flyer miles courtesy of Pan Am (another institution that has gone the way of the USSR) and stayed in the apartment of a friend of a friend. A couchette on the night train to St. Petersburg set me back about 26 cents’ worth of rubles; on the return trip I bought a whole four-passenger compartment. Lunch for three at a “cooperative” restaurant (pickled veggies, not-bad pizza, cognac), about 38 cents. Reverse-chic Soviet neckties at TSUM (Central Universal Stores), the Gimbel’s to Moscow’s Macy’s, the more famous GUM (Government Universal Stores), a nickel each. Subway rides, about two-tenths of a cent each. The whole nine-day trip has cost me about $200, mostly for gifts and meals for Russian friends and souvenirs to take home.

I’ve been asking people if Communism left anything worthwhile behind. Everyone gives the same answer: the Metro, the legendary Moscow subway that served as an argument-clincher for a generation of American communists. True enough: the Moscow subway is the only Soviet institution that is indisputably the best of its kind in the world. Like the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of the Incas, and the Roman colosseum, it has a brutal splendor that transcends the moral squalor of its origins. A Russian friend adds something else to the list: the “Seven Stalinist Sisters.” the mock-gothic, wedding-cake skyscrapers that dot the cityscape. “I hate them, myself,” the friend says, “but my eight-year-old daughter loves them. She says they’re magic castles. She says gremlins and goblins must live there.” A wise little girl.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a former editor of The New Republic.

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Moscow, a Newspaper City

By David Remnick

At his dacha in the woods outside Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev climbed into the back seat of a Zil limousine and headed north, toward the Kremlin. It was the morning after Christmas, and suddenly the Soviet Union was a half-remembered dream and its last general secretary a pensioner. Gorbachev wanted to take care of some final meetings and clean out his desk before starting a few weeks of vacation. The Russian government had promised him a peaceful day or two before it took up residence in the Kremlin. But when he arrived at his office he saw that his nameplate had already been pried off the wall. “Yeltsin, Boris Nikolaevich” was there, gleaming brassily, in its place. Inside the office, Yeltsin was sitting behind the desk. For days, there had been an air of self-pity about Gorbachev, and this petty incident seemed to transform it into fury. Never mind Gorbachev’s own assaults on Yeltsin over the years. “For me, they have poisoned the air,” he complained to a reporter. “They have humiliated me.”

This was a historic moment in Moscow: for the first time, an elected President occupying the Kremlin; the hammer and sickle gone from the flagpole; the regime and the empire dissolved. And yet history felt like nothing more than a miserable winter day; the Western press corps roamed Red Square in search of passion or comment. “You care, we don’t,” an old woman from the provincial city of Tver told a clutch of reporters. With that, she stormed off in search of potatoes and milk for her family.

In the afternoon, Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, invited a small group of aides, foreign reporters, and Russian editors to a reception at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel. A farewell party, Grachev called it, and he could not have chosen a more appropriate stage. For years, the hotel, across the street from the French Embassy, was a symbol of the Communist Party’s kitschy opulence. The lobby and the dining rooms are heavy on marble and mirrors. Every fixture, it seems, was designed with a certain solicitude for the aging members of the Central Committee—feudal lords of the provinces—who would visit Moscow a few times a year for their plenary sessions and shopping sprees. The Communist Party discovered in its dying days that its financial situation had declined dramatically, and that the only solution was the quick sale of its assets. The Oktyabrskaya Hotel, once known to Muscovites as the Waldorf-Astoria of the Central Committee, is now open for the high-end tourist trade.

At a few minutes before five o’clock, the reporters and the editors stood waiting at the top of the marble stairs for Gorbachev to arrive. By chance, I took my place near two of the city’s best-known newspaper editors: Len Karpinsky, the editor-in-chief and a columnist of the weekly Moscow News ; and Vitaly Tretyakov, a young defector from Moscow News , who had started Nezavisimaya Gazeta ( Independent Newspaper ), the closest thing Russia has ever had to a Western daily. Standing there, I was struck by the fact that Gorbachev’s resignation meant a transition from Karpinsky’s generation of intellectual idealists to a breed of younger men and women like Tretyakov—business neophytes, scholars, hustlers, newspaper editors—who would build a new world not so much out of the jagged ruins of the old experiment as out of fragmentary notions gathered from the West.

Karpinsky is what Muscovites call a shestidesyatnik —someone who came of age in the early nineteen-sixties, during the exhilarating thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, and grew disillusioned when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, in 1968. That generation harbored the dream of a humane socialism in Russia. Its members did not dare take the risks of full-blown dissidence but found a measure of independence and sanity in their work. There were scholars who fled the oppressive scrutiny of Moscow for institutes in provincial cities from Tartu to Novosibirsk; there were journalists who fled Pravda for Prague and wrote for Problems of Peace and Socialism . Some shestidesyatniki even found it possible to work and think in small, relatively liberal pockets of the Communist Party apparatus in Moscow. Karpinsky first met Gorbachev thirty years ago, when both were prominent in the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. Shared hints of dissatisfaction, of irony, made them comrades of a sort. But Karpinsky was both ambitious and angry, and he had long since veered into the dangerous terrain of what he always called “my life as a half-dissident.” Gorbachev’s appearance as a leader of reform, in 1985, was what Karpinsky had been waiting for all his adult life. Under Gorbachev, Karpinsky went from disgrace to rehabilitation, then on to real stardom in the new world of journalism. When Gorbachev, in the last months of his rule, made serious miscalculations and proved unable to act decisively against the hard-liners who eventually placed him under house arrest for three days in the Crimea, Karpinsky quit the Party and put his hopes in Yeltsin. Yet that conversion, after the assault on Lithuania, in January of 1991—a conversion nearly unanimous among the Moscow intellectuals of Karpinsky’s age and background—was a kind of afterword, a coda to the failed dream of perestroika . Now, as Gorbachev was leaving center stage, so was Karpinsky. Moscow News , which had broken one taboo after another in the first years of perestroika , had become a tired paper: still interesting at times, still honest, but one that spoke to a generation that now seemed, with Gorbachev, exhausted.

“It’s good that Gorbachev’s leaving now, but I am moved to the core,” Karpinsky told me. “How can I deny that I have just finished the most important chapter of my life?”

That day in Moscow, Vitaly Tretyakov was thirty-nine years old—a quarter of a century younger than Karpinsky. In just one year, Tretyakov had developed a paper totally alien to what had been the Soviet Union. From its first issue, in December of 1990, Nezavisimaya Gazeta had never known government interference or censorship, and its language was free of ideology. The first issue appeared just as Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as Foreign Minister and made his uncanny prediction of an incipient dictatorship. The paper’s coverage of the rise of the hard-line counter-revolution and the August coup was unmatched. Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s combination of news, conflicting commentaries, highbrow essays, and satire made Moscow News seem hopelessly earnest and a little antique. While the pages of Moscow News were filled with the avuncular columns and the hand-wringing of old and worn-out men, reporters in their twenties at Nezavisimaya Gazeta were filching Party documents, printing the confessions of military spies, and conducting irreverent interviews with government leaders. Tretyakov gave free rein to people like Tatyana Malkina, who is twenty-four years old and once worked as a researcher at Moscow News . At a news conference held by the eight conspirators during the August coup, Malkina asked the most penetrating question of the hour. Fixing her eyes on the half-drunk pretender to power, Gennadi Yanayev, she said, “Tell me, please, do you realize that you have carried out a state coup? And which comparison would you find more appropriate—1917 or 1964?” Yanayev’s hand began to quiver uncontrollably as he careered through his reply.

“I’m supposed to be young, but sometimes I feel a hundred years old when I watch what my reporters dare to do,” Tretyakov told me later. “They are the first generation that knows no fear. Journalism is not a mission for them, as it was for us at Moscow News . It’s a terrific game.”

It was now five o’clock, and everyone at the top of the stairs was looking down, to see if Gorbachev would appear. Then the front doors opened and a few of Gorbachev’s closest advisers walked through—owlish little men in mouse-gray overcoats, among them Aleksandr Yakovlev, Georgi Shakhnazarov, and Anatoly Chernyaev. These were the bookish apparatchiks who had warned Gorbachev of the enemies in their midst, and had failed, ultimately, to penetrate their man’s gigantic, and tragic, self-possession. Just behind them was Gorbachev, wearing a coat the color of smoke. He looked up at the crowd and seemed embarrassed; there was something feeble in his smile. For years, he had played the press corps so easily. At first, it was enough that he was ambulatory and reasonably fluent in his own language—that he was not Brezhnev or Chernenko—but with time it was clear as well that he had an apparently effortless ability to connect, to seem to recognize a face in a crowd. And he had the gifts of surprise and agility. Now, at the end, if he was going to remain a force in politics and become Yeltsin’s moderate opposition he would want to give a decent performance at this reception. As Gorbachev shed his coat and began climbing the stairs, the reporters and the photographers began applauding; the applause was hesitant at first, but then it grew louder, and the sound reverberated from the marble and the high windows. Gorbachev clasped his hands together and shook them, more relieved than triumphant.

In a reception room, near tables covered with huge platters of smoked fish and roasted meats, Gorbachev gave a wheezy little speech, made all the worse by a horrendous public-address system. His clichés about the great missions of the past few years came out like the muffled, echoing announcements at a bowling alley. His aides looked bored and weary. But then, with that ritual over, Gorbachev threw himself into the event with gusto. He polished off a shot of lemon vodka and a slice of pickled herring, dangling the herring between forefinger and thumb and dropping it onto his tongue. In a voice of tricked-up cheer, he held his glass up to the guests and the cameras and said, “You think I can’t do it, but now I can afford to.” As Gorbachev worked the room, moving from one cluster of questioners to another, he made it clear that he had no intention of fading away. “I have big plans,” he said. “I am not leaving the political scene.” The later it got, the more pointed his gibes about his successors became. “I just could not go on,” he said. “Everything I did in the last few months, Yeltsin was always opposing. There was just no way. No way. It’s easy to be against Gorbachev, always against Gorbachev all the time. They have always been in opposition. So now I’m gone. There’s no one for them to oppose. So now let them do what they can.”

The transition in Russia these past few months has been far more profound than the turn from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Genuine democracy is only now in the making, and economic reform remains a distant hope. So far, the great change in Russia has been one of mind and attitude.

The regime knew that it could not modernize without entering the age of information. And it was information—the truth about Soviet history and the failure of ideology—that brought an end to the regime. In the first years of perestroika , the intellectual, spiritual, and journalistic leaders of that change of mind were the shestidesyatniki —men and women like Karpinsky, idealists who suddenly provided an open, civil discourse where there had been none. In the past year, these people have given way to the new generation, less encumbered by the past or by self-doubt, more hardheaded, cynical, practical. Its members are businessmen who travel to Europe for weekend meetings; young academics specializing in the works of Hayek, Mill, and Burke; journalists who find their models in American investigative reporters and, not infrequently, the New York Post . The transition in journalism from Moscow News to Nezavisimaya Gazeta was perhaps the quickest and most visible of these shifts. To witness Len Karpinsky’s transformations—in print and in person—over the Party, socialism, and Gorbachev, and then to confront an army of kids, untroubled by the murk of ideology or by the censor’s pen, was to get a sense of the transition of Russian generations which is now in play.

Len Karpinsky’s parents were Old Bolsheviks. He was named in honor of his father’s mentor and friend Lenin. “ ‘Len’ was pretty common then, and so was ‘Ninel’—‘Lenin’ backward—or ‘Vladilen,’ for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” Karpinsky told me at his office one afternoon. “I’m just glad I didn’t get a name like ‘Elektrifikatsiya’ or some others my friends were stuck with.”

Karpinsky’s father, Vyacheslav Karpinsky, belonged to a generation of revolutionary romantics, the fin-de-siècle Communists. He joined the Communist Party in 1898, and in 1903, after his activities as a political organizer got him into trouble with the police in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, he went into foreign exile, according to an interview that was published in “Voices of Glasnost,” by Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel. In Switzerland, he became Lenin’s aide and copy editor. In Moscow, after the revolution, he helped Lenin assemble his personal archives and held various posts at Pravda and the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda. He received three Orders of Lenin, and in 1962 became the first journalist ever named a Hero of Socialist Labor.

For the Karpinsky family, a life in revolution provided an elevated existence. From 1932 to 1952, they lived in the famous House on the Embankment—a huge pile across the river from the Kremlin. Other tenants were the Kremlin élite: generals, Central Committee members, agents of the secret police. There were special dining halls stocked with groceries of a sort unknown to the rest of the socialist paradise. There were billiard halls, swimming pools, and, for the children, Special School No. 19. When Len Karpinsky was a boy, he was friendly with a couple of Stalin’s nephews. At a birthday party once, Stalin appeared in a doorway. “Children!” one of the adults announced. “Joseph Vissarionovich is here!” Stalin waved and smiled. The children all waited in silence until he left, and then resumed their games.

That was in 1935. In the coming years, Karpinsky watched dumbstruck as one after another of his friends in the building lost parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents to Stalin’s purges. Nearly every night, secret-police vans would arrive and there would be arrests—an admiral, a lecturer on Marxism-Leninism, the sisters of a spy in a foreign embassy. “There was a knock and then they disappeared,” Karpinsky said. It had been the world of Yuri Trifonov’s novella “The House on the Embankment”—a world where “a life went on that was utterly different” from the life of ordinary people. Now it was a world where the most devoted revolutionaries, the most obsequious ministers, suddenly found themselves declared “plotters” and “infiltrators” and “enemies of the people.” Karpinsky’s family was, by the standards of the building, not hard hit. One of his aunts and her two brothers were sent off to the camps. To this day, Karpinsky does not quite understand why his father, the very sort of Lenin loyalist who so threatened Stalin, was not arrested and executed. The only reason he can think of now, he says, is that by 1937 or 1938 his father was semi-retired and out of politics.

From the moment I moved to Moscow, in January of 1988, until leaving, four years later, I read Moscow News , and particularly Karpinsky, avidly. Everyone did. The leadership had installed Karpinsky’s old friend Yegor Yakovlev as editor-in-chief of the newspaper in 1986, and almost from that point it was clear that Moscow News would be the paper of the thaw generation, the one that would subtly break the taboos formed over seventy years. From time to time, I visited Karpinsky at the Moscow News office, on Pushkin Square, and he always seemed to me an honest man, if a limited writer—a representative figure, whose life had been, as he remarked to me, “an inner conflict between the ambition to be a boss in the Communist Party and the almost involuntary development of a conscience.” His appearance today, waxen and drawn, speaks of that struggle. His face is long, lined, and worn. The fingers of his right hand are yellowed up to the first knuckle, from tobacco. More often than not, when I called and asked how he was he would say dryly, “My health is awful. I’m spending the week in a sanatorium. I may die.”

Karpinsky is so unassuming, and so ironic about his own failures and hesitations, that it is hard to believe he was once an ambitious Communist, a dutiful apparatchik who believed deeply in Communism and in himself—in his entitlement to success. After entering Moscow State University, in 1947, he began working as a “propaganda man” at factories and construction sites during the days before the Party’s single-candidate elections. “My assignment was to make the workers get up at 6 a.m. and go to the polls,” he told me one afternoon. “There was a competition among the propaganda men over whose group would be the first to finish voting. The deadline was midday, by which time the whole Soviet people was supposed to have voted. That was a decision of the Party. We eighteen-year-olds were supposed to carry on propaganda among the workers, and our only tool was the promise to improve their housing conditions. They lived in horrible slums, or in railway cars, with no toilets, no heat. I loved the work, thought it was a great service—and, yes, a stepping stone. At the university, Yuri Levada, who is now a well-known sociologist, wrote an article about me called ‘The Careerist.’ And it was true. I did it all with the idea of getting to the top. That was what it was all about—to be one of the bosses.”

After a pause, Karpinsky ground out a cigarette and went on, “But, having said that, I have to say a few words in self-defense. Society during the Stalin era left open no real opportunities for self-realization or self-expression except within this perverted system of the Communist Party. The system destroyed all the other channels—the artist’s canvas, the farmer’s land. All that was left was the gigantic hierarchic system of the Party, wide at the base and growing narrower as one climbed to the top. You had to have a Party membership just for admission. That was your only opportunity. When you are engaged in that work, you forget about the social and political implications and just do it. Gradually, though, this sort of life bifurcates your mind, your intellect. You do eventually begin to understand that life is life and it’s better to do something good for thy neighbor than to climb upward stepping on his bones. It all depends on moral principles. I suppose my first doubts came when I went to Moscow State University. A Jewish friend of mine named Karl Kantor was attacked by the university’s Party committee at the beginning of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign. That was just the start of a long transformation.

“After graduation, I was sent to the city of Gorki for Komsomol work. At that point, Stalin had one more year to live. I got to know the working class and the peasants in Gorki. I saw the utter degradation, the ruin. I saw Soviet society as it had really emerged. Some people still think, erroneously, that the life of the apparatchik breeds only conformists and subjects loyal to the regime. Actually, the regime splits people into two opposing factions—those who believe they can make it only through conformism and timeserving, and those who, thanks to a different structure of mind, dare to question the surrounding reality.”

He paused again, and then said, “So when Stalin died I realized perfectly well what he had been all about. Still, I went to the funeral in Moscow, out of curiosity. I felt like one of those prisoners in the camps who threw their hats in the air and cried, ‘The man-eater has finally kicked the bucket!’ My father’s reaction to Stalin’s death was interesting. By then, he was retired, working for the Central Committee only as a consultant. He sat there in his office, typing on an old Underwood, which he had brought from the offices he shared with Lenin in Switzerland. He called me into his study and said, ‘Son, Comrade Stalin has passed away. And, having been an epigone of Lenin, he created all the necessary conditions for our cause to triumph.’ It was so strange. My father had never before in his life talked so formally to me. I think he talked that way because his generation had always carried the burden of promoting the Party line at all times, and he felt that it was his duty to pass that down to his children. But this was a man, eighty years old, who had conceived his idea of the Party before the revolution and while living in exile. He had to convince not me but himself. He was talking to himself.”

When Karpinsky returned from Gorki to Moscow for good, in 1959, Khrushchev was the general secretary, and the thaw was in full swing. Novy Mir , Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s monthly journal of literature and opinion, was publishing texts critical of the old regime. Khrushchev himself read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” and sanctioned its publication in Novy Mir . Karpinsky’s friends Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky were winning a following with their foppish lyrics and performances. In various pockets of the Central Committee apparatus, young apparatchiks wrote proposals and outlines of economic and political reform—though all within certain boundaries of ideology and language. Karpinsky, for his part, worked as the head of the Komsomol’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation and as the editor of Molodoi Kommunist ( Young Communist ). Then, in 1962, he joined the empyrean of the adult Communist world. He was promoted to Pravda ’s editorial board, to head the department of Marxism-Leninism. He had made it.

“Once I was back in Moscow from Gorki, my critical approach weakened somewhat,” Karpinsky said. “I was part of the élite again, and not merely as my father’s son but as a real member. I was part of the top nomenklatura , and the nomenklatura is another planet. It’s Mars. It’s not simply a matter of good cars or apartments. It’s the continuous satisfaction of your own exclusivity; it’s the way an army of bootlickers allows you to work for hours. All the little apparatchiks are ready to do everything for you. Your every wish is fulfilled. You can go to the theatre on a whim, you can fly to Japan from your hunting lodge. It’s a life in which everything flows easily. No, you don’t own a yacht or spend your vacations on the Côte d’Azur, but you are at the Black Sea, and that is really something. The issue is your relative well-being. You are like a king: just point your finger and it is done.”

Karpinsky’s potential as a man of the Communist Party élite was unlimited. It is conceivable that he could have won eventual appointment to the Politburo. He was a Soviet Ivy Leaguer: bright, ambitious, a Legacy. One afternoon, at a Kremlin ceremony, two of Khrushchev’s most powerful partners in the leadership, Mikhail Suslov and Boris Ponomarev, called Karpinsky their golden boy, their comer. One of them said that Karpinsky was like “a son of the regiment” to them, and that they saw for him a great future in the ideological department of the Communist Party. “We are pinning our hopes on you,” Suslov said.

Working in that rarefied atmosphere, Karpinsky got to know nearly every figure who would make a difference (one way or the other) during perestroika . He was friendly with Yegor Yakovlev, the Lenin biographer, who became the editor of Moscow News ; Yuri Karyakin, a Dostoyevski scholar, who was among the leading radical deputies in the Congress of People’s Deputies; Aleksandr Bovin, the gargantuan journalist who propagandized the “new thinking” in foreign policy at Izvestia ; the reform-minded economists Gavriil Popov and Nikolai Shmelyov and the sociologist Yevgeny Ambartsumov; Otto Latsis, the son of an Old Bolshevik and an editor at Kommunist ; Gennadi Yanayev and Boris Pugo, who helped lead the August coup; and even the leading triumvirate of reform, Eduard Shevardnadze, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

“I first met Gorbachev when I was working at Pravda and he was in Stavropol working in the Komsomol organization there,” Karpinsky said. “He was not very well known at the time, but I must tell you that Gorbachev was saying the same things then that he said at the beginning of perestroika . He was in Moscow on some business trip or other—I forget what it was about—but we met for a couple of hours, and I was impressed. He talked about the outrage of paying combine operators by their mileage, and not by their output. To put it in a nutshell, he spoke about the absurd system of incentives, or lack of them, in the economy. He was excitable but somehow very rational. And for the first two or three years of perestroika Gorbachev was the same sort of innovator he had been when he was young. The innovative projects were always limited, within certain boundaries, and that, of course, was significant later on. Well, I understand him. Like all of us, Gorbachev had to have a dual nature. It was in his mind, in his soul. He knew well that the idea of reward for work well done was considered out of the ordinary but not quite heretical. You could experiment with something limited like that. But we were not allowed to make any political or philosophical conclusions suggesting that the system itself was a failure. In your mind, you avoided such conclusions. You were simply incapable of thinking that way. To think that way was not only career suicide but a form of despair. And so, like the rest of us, Gorbachev hedged—outwardly and within himself.”

Karpinsky and his friends were at first not much upset by Brezhnev and Suslov’s overthrow of Khrushchev, in 1964. When Karpinsky heard the news, he and Yegor Yakovlev celebrated over a bottle of cognac. Khrushchev had long since tightened restrictions on the press and the arts, and had become prone to unpredictable decisions—a manic “voluntarism,” as the Party language had it. Only years later, when Khrushchev was a sad old man living in exile at his dacha, did Karpinsky call him, to wish him well on his birthday. Karpinsky said that he was calling on behalf of “the children of the Twentieth Party Congress,” and that Khrushchev should know that one day history would make clear to everyone the importance of that session, in 1956, at which he levelled his first attacks against Stalin’s “cult of personality.”

“I have always believed this, and I am very pleased that you and your relatively young generation understand the essence of the Twentieth Congress and the policies I initiated,” Khrushchev replied. “I am so happy to hear from you in my twilight years.”

It did not take Karpinsky or anyone else long to realize that Brezhnev had no intention of making reforms. Just the opposite. A neo-Stalinist movement was in the works. One night at dinner with Yevtushenko and Otto Latsis, Karpinsky began to speak out about what was happening to his generation, to its cast of mind. “Our idea was this: when one has an education in philosophy and a certain intellectual background, one begins to understand the inner properties of reality—something I termed intellectual conscience,” he told me. “It’s not a natural, inborn conscience but a conscience that stems from a kind of thinking that links you with a moral attitude toward reality. If you understand that everything in this society is soaked in blood, that the society itself is heading toward collapse, that it is all an anti-human system—if you understand this instinctively and intellectually—then your conscience cannot remain neutral. Look, I never really took any risks, and didn’t want to. I was sort of compelled by my conscience to take what steps I did. And, once compelled to take those steps, I could never foresee the bad consequences. Every time, I thought I’d get away with it. And, every time, I didn’t.”

Karpinsky made his first real foray into the netherworld of “half-dissent” in 1967, and it was a personal disaster. He and a friend at Pravda , Fyodor Burlatsky, wrote an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda calling, in a euphemistic way, for an easing of censorship in the theatre. Karpinsky now says that the piece was “half-rotten,” especially its solipsistic arguments that the best way to eliminate anti-Soviet sentiments from the theatre would be to let the people, and not the official censors, decide. That way, the authors said, the playwrights would have no right to complain about the government, and so would be deprived of a source of anger and subject matter. But the article, “On the Road to the Première,” contained one idea, plainly stated, that caused an uproar when it appeared: the personality cult, Karpinsky and Burlatsky said, had been criticized only lightly, and the censors were preventing anything deeper.

Brezhnev, who had already begun the ideological rehabilitation of Stalin, was furious when his aides brought the piece to his attention. He took the article as a personal attack. By chance, the article had appeared on the same day that a member of the Central Committee criticized the military industry, which had been Brezhnev’s province before he became general secretary. Karpinsky, Burlatsky, and the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda were fired. Karpinsky was quickly appointed to a job at Izvestia , but after he made a few critical remarks at a meeting of that paper’s Communist Party committee he was eased out of there, too.

Despite his inherited romantic view of Bolshevism and his own pleasure in the perquisites of power, Karpinsky could no longer hide his disaffection. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August of 1968, was for Karpinsky and many of his friends a breaking point. He did not join the seven young protesters who went to Red Square with banners and were arrested and sent to prison or a psychiatric hospital or into exile. Nor did he form any links with Andrei Sakharov or other leading intellectuals who had decided, once and for all, to give up their lives in the hierarchy for the dangers of political dissidence. But he did act. Under the pen name L. Okunev, Karpinsky wrote a long article called “Words Are Also Deeds,” for circulation only among a select group of friends and would-be reformers within the world of the Party and its official academies. (The article was published abroad in 1982 in Stephen F. Cohen’s book “An End to Silence.”) The pseudonym was an inside joke: “Karpinsky” derives from “carp,” and “Okunev” from “perch.” In the article Karpinsky argued that free thought—and not “rows of armed soldiers, insurgent crowds, columns of revolutionary sailors, or a volley from the cruiser Aurora”—would one day challenge the Soviet system. Furthermore, the state structures and ideological machinery would not be able to resist, for the system “lacks any serious social basis. It cannot convince anyone of its fertility and hangs on only by the instinct of self-preservation,” he wrote. “The farce of neo-Stalinism we are passing through is just the outward expression of the ‘uneasy forebodings’ the petty tyrants feel. They long for the old regime, the ‘Stalin fortress,’ but they find only decrepit foundations, too weak to support such a structure.”

The article, like nearly all of Karpinsky’s writings, is clogged with indirection and filler, great clots of the undigested verbiage of the typical Party apparatchik. It was, however, remarkable not only for its moments of clarity and daring but also for its prescience. Here was an apparatchik (“We are pinning our hopes on you,” Suslov had said) who now believed no more in the viability of the Bolshevik state than did Berdyaev, Sakharov, Amalrik, or Solzhenitsyn.

“Our tanks in Prague were, if you will, an anachronism, an ‘inadequate’ weapon,” Karpinsky wrote. “They ‘fired’ at—ideas. With no hope of hitting the target. They ‘dealt with’ the Czechoslovak situation the same way that at one time certain reptiles ‘dealt with’ the coming of the age of mammals. The reptiles bit at the air, gnashing their teeth in the same ether that was literally seething with the plankton of renewal. At the same time, fettered by their natural instincts, they searched for ‘hidden stocks of weapons’ and diligently occupied the postal and telegraph offices. With a fist to the jaw of thinking society, they thought they had knocked out and ‘captured’ its thinking processes.”

Karpinsky also provided an insider’s view, identifying within the monolith of the Party structure “a layer of Party intellectuals.” He went on to say, “To be sure, this layer is thin and disconnected; it is constantly eroded by coöptation and promotion, and is thickly interlaced with careerists, flatterers, loudmouths, jesuits, cowards, and other products of the bureaucratic selection process. But this layer could move toward an alliance with the entire social body of the intelligentsia if favorable conditions arose. This layer is already an arm of the intelligentsia, its ‘parliamentary faction’ within the administrative structure. This faction will inevitably grow, constituting a hidden opposition, without specific shape and not aware of itself, but an actually existing and widely ramified opposition at all levels within the administrative chain.”

And that is precisely what happened between 1985 and 1988. The dissidents were the bravest and most clear-minded of all, but in the early Gorbachev years they did not provide, in numbers or in force, an adequate army. As if from nowhere, intellectuals within the Party, the institutes, the press, and the literary, artistic, and scientific worlds slowly took a Soviet leader at his word that this would be a different age. For once, the purposes of a Kremlin leader and the liberal intelligentsia intersected.

The tragedy was that by the time Gorbachev came to power there were so many broken lives: great minds lost to emigration, drink, suicide, despair, or sheer cynicism. “So many people had been destroyed,” Karpinsky said. “You can maintain that split way of thinking for a while, but then you begin to degenerate and start to speak only what is permitted, and the rest of the conscience and the soul decays. Many people did not survive to perestroika . We had to create an internal moral system, and not everyone could sustain that indefinitely. Solzhenitsyn spoke about this in his essay ‘Live Not by Lies.’ I understood his viewpoint, and we tried not to live by lies, but we couldn’t always manage it. If you ignore the regulations of the state completely, and go into total dissidence, then you can’t have a family: you don’t know where you will get rent money, and your children would have to go into the streets to scrape up a living. To fulfill this principle of not living under a lie in every aspect is just impossible, because you live in a certain time.

“Compared with the people who were not afraid of prison, my friends and I were not heroes. We abstained from direct acts. This position was itself a compromise. But it was the sort of compromise you make when you are in a cage with a lion. It is understandable, though nothing to be proud of. When I myself was in the position of having to say what I felt, I said it. I just didn’t deliberately try to put my head in a noose. I used Aesopian language. I had to use hints about progress—nothing more. What we did publish only hinted at our real thoughts.”

But “Words Are Also Deeds” went far beyond Aesopian language. In 1970, Karpinsky gave a copy of his text to Roy Medvedev, the Marxist historian. A few months later, Medvedev called Karpinsky and told him that the K.G.B. had ransacked his apartment and taken every manuscript in sight, including “Words Are Also Deeds.” For a few years, Karpinsky was oblivious of the trouble he was in. He bounced around from job to job, from a sociology institute to editing Marxist-Leninist works at Progress Publishers. But in 1975, when he was caught working on the manuscript of his friend Otto Latsis’s book “On the Eve of a Great Breakthrough,” an analysis of collectivization and Stalinism, the K.G.B. called him in. Naturally, the interrogator was an old friend: a Komsomol colleague named Filipp Bobkov, who had become one of the most infamous figures in the Soviet secret police. Karpinsky tried to soften up Bobkov. “When you came to me, there was tea and cookies,” he told him. “You don’t even offer me tea. It’s not very polite.” Bobkov was not amused. He passed the damning documents along to the Communist Party Control Committee, and Len Karpinsky, the son of Lenin’s friend and the Party’s great hope, was expelled. Suslov, for one, viewed Karpinsky’s transgressions as a personal betrayal.

Now Karpinsky did whatever he could to make a living—among other things, commissioning paintings and monuments for a state agency, for which he received a minuscule salary. He kept up his friendships, talked politics, and for a while lived at the dacha he had inherited from his father. The moment of reckoning he had written about in “Words Are Also Deeds,” the advent of dissent as a cultural and political fact of life, seemed years off.

Even after Gorbachev took power, in March of 1985, Karpinsky never dreamed that change could happen so quickly. And, at first, it did not. Although the liberals in the Politburo secured the editorship of Moscow News for Karpinsky’s friend Yegor Yakovlev and told him to transform the tourist giveaway sheet into “a tribune of reform,” glasnost was initially a process of hints, insinuations. To read now through a stack of Moscow News issues from 1987 and 1988 is to get lost in a blur of non-language. The barriers were immense at first, the victories almost unbearably difficult. When the editors of Moscow News wanted to print a simple obituary of the writer Viktor Nekrasov, the Politburo itself had to give permission, and did so only after long debate.

“But still the change was tremendous,” Karpinsky said. “The difference between the thaw and glasnost was a difference in temperature. If the temperature under Khrushchev was two degrees above zero Celsius, then glasnost pushed it to twenty above. Huge chunks of ice just melted away, and now we were talking not only about Stalin’s personality cult but also about Leninism, Marxism, the essence of the system. There had been nothing like that under Khrushchev. It had been just a narrow opening, through which only Stalin’s cult could be seen. There had been no real changes. And, as we saw, it could all be reversed. The bureaucracy, the Party, the K.G.B.—all the repressive apparatus in charge of the intelligentsia and the press—were in place.”

For Karpinsky, Moscow News provided the opening to a public hearing and also to a rehabilitation. In March of 1987, he published a long article entitled “It’s Absurd to Hesitate Before an Open Door.” Like his liberal pieces of the past, it was a mixed performance. He made sure to blast the West for what he thought was its phony concern for the Soviet dissidents, but he also made a crucial point that was then getting close consideration within the government: the critique of Stalin begun in 1956 would have to go deeper. Reform without a thorough assessment of the country’s “core” problems, the rottenness of its history and foundations, would be meaningless.

Karpinsky wanted to rejoin the Party, not only as personal vindication but also in order to play a role in what was still the central institution of political power. At a meeting with the chairman of the Party’s Control Committee, however, the hard-liner Mikhail Solomentsev mocked Karpinsky. From a thick stack of papers that had obviously been compiled by the Party and the K.G.B., Solomentsev pulled out a copy of “Words Are Also Deeds,” and, holding it up, he shouted, “You still have not disarmed ideologically! Nothing has changed in our party!” But things had changed. The sharp ideological divisions within the Party had become an open secret, an open struggle, and the trick was to get the support of powerful liberals within the structure. Three old friends of Karpinsky’s—Yuri Afanasyev, Nikolai Shmelyov, and Yuri Karyakin—brought to the Nineteenth Special Party Conference, in June of 1988, a petition demanding his rehabilitation. With the help of his old acquaintances Aleksandr Yakovlev and, amazingly, Boris Pugo, the gambit worked. By the next year, Karpinsky was in the regular rotation as a columnist at Moscow News —a golden boy, he says, “of a certain age.”

In the past few years, Moscow has been a newspaper fanatic’s dream. Karpinsky’s columns and Moscow News are only a part of the morning haul. Having started from nothing, from the jargon of the Communist Party press, Moscow has become the most exciting newspaper city since New York after the Second World War. The thaw was a liberalization dominated by a few works of real literature, but glasnost has been a period of journalism—of investigation, history, sensation, commentary, and scoop. At first, the most obvious mainstays of glasnost were Moscow News and the weekly magazine Ogonyok. But, as glasnost evolved into more genuine freedom for the press, the democratic vista widened. Today, there are the breathless papers that rush to the aid of the Yeltsin cause: the semi-official daily, Rossiiskaya Gazeta , and, with a circulation of twenty million, Komsomolskaya Pravda . Literaturnaya Gazeta prints a blend of high-minded cultural criticism, political analysis, and Yuri Shchekochikhin’s investigative work on the K.G.B. Argumenty i Fakty , with a circulation of more than twenty-five million, is a kind of weekly bulletin board of two-hundred-word articles and factoids. When it ran a poll a couple of years ago revealing Andrei Sakharov’s enormous popularity and Gorbachev’s slump, Gorbachev had a public fit and threatened to fire the editor. (Instead, he fired the hawkish editor of Pravda , Viktor Afanasyev.)

The former government organ Izvestia held a putsch of its own in August, tossing out its apparatchik editor, Nikolai Yefimov, and replacing him with a team that has made Izvestia the daily paper of record: stolid, wealthy, rich with foreign news, humorless. Izvestia ’s series on Moscow’s destruction of Korean Airlines Flight 007 was at least as good as anything on that subject published in the West. For tabloid sensation, there are Top Secret ’s true-crime stories (“Murder on Kutuzovsky Street!”) and Megapolis-Express ’s local muckraking. The puckish Kommersant , edited by Yegor Yakovlev’s son Vladimir, covers the emerging business world, letting young entrepreneurs know which clan rules which district and how to find cheap computers on the black market. In train stations and on street corners, hawkers do a brisk business in Baltic sex papers, mimeographed neo-Bolshevik sheets, and pirated copies of a booklet called “How to Find a Job in America and Europe.” For nostalgia’s sake, it’s still worth reading Pravda as it tries desperately to prove, out of the side of its mouth, that it never really meant what it had been saying for almost a century. Lately, Pravda has become the mouthpiece of a neo-Bolshevik movement, but, like Bolshevism, it may soon go out of business. And for the hard-liners there is Sovietskaya Rossiya , which published the key manifestos leading up to the coup, and Dyen (“The Newspaper of the Spiritual Opposition”), edited by Aleksandr Prokhanov, a theocratic militarist known affectionately as the Nightingale of the General Staff. Among the wire services, the old Big Brother of the ticker, TASS, which is now known as ITAR-TASS, has been neutered and taken over by the Russian government, while Interfax and a few agencies in the other republics have the manic intensity of the Associated Press on a good day. Interfax’s leading reporter, Vyacheslav Terekhov, is a bulldog in a brown suit, pestering politicians and filing dispatches from breakfast until midnight. He scooped the world by several hours last August when he reported that Gorbachev would dissolve the Communist Party.

Until 1988, or 1989 at the latest, Moscow News remained the country’s singular iconoclast, always smashing idols just before the reformers in the leadership did. In any given week, a foreign reporter in the Soviet Union could sit down with a copy of Moscow News and simply rewrite two or three of its revelations to make news at home. The hard-liner Yegor Ligachev called Moscow News an “ersatz” paper, but Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Aleksandr Yakovlev obviously felt otherwise. Moscow News was clearly the voice of the liberals in the Politburo. But the lack of real independence at Moscow News , its link to Gorbachev himself, began to work against it in 1990 and 1991. As the country became more diverse, as the liberal intelligentsia’s ideas about the future of society and politics grew far more radical than Gorbachev’s own, Moscow News , under Yegor Yakovlev, began to look a bit timid and almost comically protective of its original patron.

“Without realizing it, Yegor was turning Moscow News into Pravda ,” I was told by Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s editor, Vitaly Tretyakov, who was Yakovlev’s deputy at the time. “Just as Pravda was the tribune of the old powers, he wanted Moscow News to be the tribune of the new power, the left-of-center position, the Gorbachev position in the Politburo. When I became Yegor’s deputy, I began to see how many visitors and calls there were from the Central Committee, and it was obvious that the paper was not operating independently. Len Karpinsky was much more radical than Yegor, but Moscow News could be only as radical as Yegor would allow it to be. Yegor has the personality of a dictator, and that may be necessary, but he always wanted to be in possession of ultimate truth—he claimed to know all the answers. None of us at Moscow News could take a step without Yegor’s say-so. You couldn’t mention Lenin, for instance, because Yegor thought he knew all there was to know about him. And then there was Gorbachev: we could not criticize him directly. And what could someone like Len do? After all, it was Yegor who pulled Len out of obscurity and got him a job.”

By the summer of 1990, millions of people were quitting the Communist Party. The party that called itself “the initiator of perestroika ”—an appalling bit of self-congratulation, considering the blood on its hands—had lost the power to convince many of its own members that it supported radical change. At Moscow News , Tretyakov proposed that the members of the paper’s Party committee all resign as one. But Yakovlev said no, they should “stay the course.” As usual, Yakovlev had the votes, Karpinsky’s included.

Tretyakov was feeling more alienated by the day from his colleagues at the paper. He was not a man of the Gorbachev generation, and he did not have the Old Bolshevik background and Party connections of so many of the shestidesyatniki . His parents were laborers. Tretyakov had worked for years on some of the glossy propaganda magazines that the government printing organs ground out like sausage meat: Soviet Life , Études Soviétiques , Soviet Woman , and the rest. His time at Moscow News was “a gift,” but, he decided, the time had come to leave. “My idea was to start something new, a better Moscow News ,” Tretyakov said.

After spending a couple of weeks recently at Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s offices and sitting in on editorial meetings, I realized that Tretyakov had had very little idea of what he wanted when he held his first planning sessions, in the summer of 1990. He knew only that he did not want to tie the editorial direction and the tone of the paper to the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev or any other political personality. At first, he tried to induce some of the best-known writers in Moscow to join him. They all turned him down. No one with a family and an established position was prepared to risk them on an experiment, a notion. Tretyakov’s one essential break came with the election of liberal democrats to Moscow City Hall. The new mayor, Gavriil Popov, and his deputy, Sergei Stankevich, were interested in Tretyakov’s idea, and gave him a start-up loan of three hundred thousand rubles. No strings attached, Popov said. Remarkably, the city officials kept their word. They have never considered the paper their own, and have never interfered in editorial or business policy. “It was just a small investment in the transition to a free press,” Stankevich said.

I had heard about the paper long before its first issue appeared. One summer afternoon two years ago, I drove to the country town of Peredelkino to visit Andrei Karaulov, a young theatre critic, and his wife, Natasha, who is the daughter of the playwright Mikhail Shatrov. Karaulov was a journalist-hustler the like of which I have never seen—at least, not in Moscow. Even in the early days of perestroika , he managed to get interviews with one Politburo member and spymaster after another. He somehow made patently evil and slimy men feel comfortable, then tortured them with a combination of unctuous charm and barbed questions. He even managed to get me in to see Gaidar Aliyev, a member of the Brezhnev circle, who has been described by the Moscow jurist and writer Arkady Vaksberg as “the living definition of the Mafia man.” Karaulov’s knack was so uncanny that some of his rivals moaned that he must have “dark connections.” Another guest at the Peredelkino dacha that afternoon was a man in his early forties named Igor Zakharov. Zakharov turned out to be just about the most cynical man I have ever known, and he seemed to scorn himself most of all. He had worked for years at the Novosti Press agency, editing propaganda magazines with Tretyakov. “I am a born functionary,” he said. “I never believed in anything official—not in Communism and not in the possibility of perestroika . I may have published all that shit, but I never believed it. You know that expression ‘Life is elsewhere’?” But this willingness to work with odious bureaucrats while holding opposing beliefs seemed to arouse less sympathy for him than it did for Karpinsky. It was somehow touching that Karpinsky actually did believe in something when he was young and then believed in something else later on. Zakharov believed in nothing but the hopelessness of almost everything, and the sudden advent of radical changes in the country made his cynicism seem worthless. So when he and Karaulov began telling me about their work with Vitaly Tretyakov on a new newspaper, to be called Nezavisimaya Gazeta , not only did I think it would fail—I also hoped that it would.

I forgot about that discussion and Nezavisimaya Gazeta until six months later, when, in December of 1990, I was on a plane from Riga to Moscow. Eduard Shevardnadze had just resigned, and the Balts suspected that they were about to become the targets of the crackdown that Shevardnadze had been warning about; they were proved tragically correct the following month. On the plane, I borrowed two issues of an unfamiliar broadsheet—the first and second issues of Nezavisimaya Gazeta —and I was startled. The front page of the first issue featured little mug shots of the country’s political leaders, and above the pictures was the headline “They Rule Us: But What Do We Know About Them, the Most Powerful People in Our Country? Almost Nothing.” On page 5 (“Ideas and People”) the historian Yuri Afanasyev published what was surely the year’s most incisive piece of political commentary: “We Are Moving to the Side of Dictatorship.” In details that proved absolutely accurate, Afanasyev described Gorbachev’s “tragedy”—how his own internal and political limitations left him open to the pressures of the hard-line Communists in the regime. It was just the sort of political critique of Gorbachev that Moscow News could not bring itself to publish. Then, on page 8 of the first issue—the back page—was a manifesto by Tretyakov declaring that there had never been “in the history of the Soviet Union” a paper independent of political interests. He would publish one. The second issue led with the headline “Eduard Shevardnadze Leaves. The Military-Industrial Complex Stays. What Choice Will Gorbachev Make?” A few pages later, Karaulov weighed in with a fascinating interview with the No. 2 man at that time in the K.G.B., Filipp Bobkov—the man who had interrogated Len Karpinsky fifteen years earlier.

One day during those first weeks of Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s life, I went to the paper’s offices with Karaulov. As we walked along the muddy streets near the K.G.B. buildings, he was trying to sell me—literally—some crackpot spy-story documents involving the Bolshoi Theatre. Information is constantly for sale now in Moscow. The Russian prosecutor assigned to investigate the August coup charges at least five hundred dollars for interviews about his work. “Interviews are creative works,” he says. When I refused Karaulov’s “tip” on the Bolshoi and explained Western rules about not paying for information, he seemed alternately bemused and hurt. “Besides, you’d never find the place without me,” he said. “You owe me for that, at least.” He had a point. Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s offices are tucked away in an obscure courtyard building not far from Lubyanka Square. At the time, the paper shared the building with the Voskhod (Sunrise) printing company. Expansion eventually eased the printers out. The paper originally had twenty people on its staff and appeared three days a week; now it has two hundred and appears five days a week. When I first visited the office, the place was a sea of paper and ironic memorabilia—faded portraits of old Politburo members a specialty. No one looked as if he had slept, showered, or shaved in days.

Rejected by the older newspaper stars, Tretyakov got his journalists wherever he could find them. Most of them had worked at second- or third-tier publications—at movie and theatrical quarterlies, Baltic underground sheets, Komsomol dailies. Some had no journalistic experience at all. They were biologists, secretaries, manual workers, students, diplomats—anything. Whatever skills they did or did not have, they had a unanimous contempt for all things sovok —a slang term for “Soviet.” (The staff’s favorite early fan letter read “Congratulations: You are neither pro-Soviet nor anti-Soviet. You are simply non-Soviet.”) All were young, and they did not bother to struggle with the questions of their elders. The ideological ruminations of a man like Len Karpinsky were for these people irrelevant and just a little bit sad.

Mikhail Leontiev, the paper’s economics editor, who was thirty-three years old, was a typical new employee. He had studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute, in Moscow, but to avoid doing “idiot work for the regime” he quit the academic world and worked for years restoring old furniture. He hardly ever wrote then, he told me. “Why bother?” He did write one prescient essay for a Latvian paper in 1989; called “The New Consensus,” it dealt with the growing front of Fascists, nationalists, and military leaders. “That was about all I could do,” Leontiev later told me between meetings at Nezavisimaya Gazeta . “I just couldn’t work for any of the old papers. Coming here, discovering Nezavisimaya Gazeta , was a revelation—the revelation we were all waiting for. The coverage of economics in our paper starts from the principle that we don’t need to tear our hair out about whether Marxism-Leninism or capitalism is the right way to go. That debate is as dead as can be. Do we really have to go crazy over whether it is good to find a healthy balance between efficiency and social welfare? About whether the rules of the market are ultimately correct? I don’t think so. I don’t cover Communism or any other religion in these pages. That’s not my business.”

The darkening political mood in the winter of 1990-91, the ominous sense that the Army, the K.G.B., and the Communist Party were now forming an open alliance against a radical reform of the country, gave the paper a clear sense of purpose. To Muscovites reading Nezavisimaya Gazeta in its first month of publication the new paper conveyed an understanding of and a foreboding about the political earthquake to come. Not so Moscow News , which still kept its reports within certain bounds. Moscow News was now responding not to censors—they had been either removed or rendered completely benign—but, rather, to an internal sense of propriety and caution, a lingering reverence for Gorbachev and the old hopes of the thaw generation.

All this changed on the streets of Vilnius. The bloody, and failed, coup attempt in Lithuania in January of 1991 changed everything for nearly all the middle-aged and older intellectuals who had remained loyal to the idea of a reformed Communist Party. While Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s staff was reporting the story of the Lithuanian coup attempt as if it were the logical extension of the events of the months before, Moscow News suddenly went through an ideological conversion. It lost all faith in Gorbachev. Karpinsky, Yegor Yakovlev, and a long list of shestidesyatniki signed a front-page editorial expressing outrage at the assault and declaring that the regime was “criminal” and was well into its “death throes.” For so long, most of these men and women had thought in terms of a socialism made somehow humane, of a steady pace of reform. Yakovlev, especially, had never liked Boris Yeltsin—never liked the way he attacked Gorbachev or conducted himself. Now this generation had nowhere to go but to Yeltsin and to the people Gorbachev had venomously referred to as “the so-called democrats.”

The staff at Nezavisimaya Gazeta viewed the conversion of Moscow News as pathetic. “The truth is, I could never understand why those people decided to make their split only when the tanks rolled into Vilnius,” Igor Zakharov said later. “It’s like trying to figure out why a woman who hates her husband for twenty years finally decides one day, after one little incident, to get up, walk out, and never come back.”

The dreams and the delusions of the editors at Moscow News died slowly. In March, Yakovlev invited Karpinsky and a few other friends to his apartment for a sixtieth-birthday party. “It was a meeting of people who didn’t know what to say to one another,” Yakovlev’s son Vladimir said. “The energy they used to have was gone, and the world around them was no longer their world. And, most important, they didn’t know how to relate to this new world. It was the feeling you get at the gatherings in Russia forty days after someone dies. No one is crying anymore, but no one knows quite what to say. These birthday gatherings had always been such celebrations. Now it was just all silence, a complete breakdown.”

Week after week, Nezavisimaya Gazeta was reinventing the newspaper in Moscow, and a twenty-seven-year-old reporter named Sergei Parkhomenko was consistently the paper’s most incisive political commentator. The son and grandson of journalists, Parkhomenko first won a name for himself at the monthly Teatr when he covered the first session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, in May of 1989—a job he called “the ultimate in theatre criticism.” He told me, “Imagine if you in America had held the Constitutional Convention live on television. The old order died a little every day. No play ever changed an audience more thoroughly.”

One night, I went with Parkhomenko to the printing presses at Izvestia , where Nezavisimaya Gazeta is published. He was the night-duty editor, acting as a liaison between the printers and the editors back at the Gazeta office, who are constantly trying to shove late items into the paper. He had already written a column in the morning and had called in a few items for his after-hours job as a stringer. Like many good young reporters in Moscow, Parkhomenko had discovered that he could make some hard currency on the side by working for a foreign news organization—in his case, Agence France-Presse, the official French wire service. As it turned out, the experience expanded his feeling for journalism. “With the French, I got a taste of real reporting,” he said. “It was a new sort of game. Who can be the first to get the information? Who can get sources? Before, it was all ‘I think this, I think that.’ Now the game had changed, and I loved it, and the skills were just what I needed. You see, I somehow always knew I would work at a place like Nezavisimaya Gazeta . I knew it instinctively. I wanted a place that was born without any complexes. There are more radical publications, but I’m not interested in the contest for who can be the most radical or liberal. I can’t stand unity and consensus.”

Parkhomenko is best known in Moscow for his commentaries—mainly because he refuses to shill for any one politician or party line—but he is also an instinctive investigative reporter. Last year, he caused a terrific scandal when he discovered that the Central Committee had for years been running a huge, fourteen-room workshop for manufacturing fake Western passports. He reported that there were fake stamps, blank passports for dozens of foreign countries, and even false mustaches and beards for the passport photographs.

Investigative work has been a signature of the front page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta . A married couple in their twenties at the paper, Anna Ostapchuk and Yevgeny Krasnikov, enraged the Party last summer when they scooped everyone by printing a copy of the Communist Party’s proposed new platform, endorsing a “democratic, humane socialism.” Ostapchuk’s methods were “quite simple and un-Soviet,” she told me. She had gone to the apartment of a Central Committee member, Vasily Lipitsky, and began asking about the platform. He gave her the document, which was twenty-three pages long and had been written by Gorbachev’s aide Georgi Shakhnazarov, and said she could read it, “but no notes and no tape recorders.”

“Then something odd happened,” Ostapchuk said. “Lipitsky said he had to take a phone call in the next room. As soon as he left, I got out my tape recorder and read the thing as fast as I could. He didn’t come back in time. I finished. But I’m sure he wanted me to do just that. It was terrific fun.”

Presented with the scoop, Tretyakov was stunned. At Moscow News , his bosses would never have permitted such a thing—too dangerous, a distinct lack of respect. But Tretyakov immediately published the piece. In a wry note to the readers, he wrote that ordinarily Nezavisimaya Gazeta did not print party manifestos and platforms, “because that would be a form of advertising,” and added, “But from such a party we would rather not take any money.”

The next day, as every newspaper in Moscow scurried to catch up with the story in Nezavisimaya Gazeta , Parkhomenko got a swift lesson in the sensibilities of the powerful. At a small, late-night press conference in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo, Gorbachev looked at the reporters and said, “O.K., so who here is from Nezavisimaya Gazeta ?”

The reporter from state television, a whinnying timeserver, blanched and panicked. “No, no, it’s him,” he said, pointing at Parkhomenko.

“Where did you steal it from?” Gorbachev said.

“I can’t say,” Parkhomenko said.

“And why not?”

“Because that’s the way we work.”

After the press conference, two of Gorbachev’s aides tried to weasel the information out of Parkhomenko.

“Oh, come on,” one of them said. “You can tell me. I won’t tell another soul!”

Shakhnazarov, for his part, told me that he was shocked to see his work in the paper. “Woodward and Bernstein—that is not exactly something we’re used to,” he said.

Sometimes Tretyakov and Zakharov, the village elders at the paper, are scared by their own reporters—by the reporters’ relentlessness and giddy fearlessness. They are well aware of how inexperienced the reporters are, how little they know about degrees of reliability and balance. Often, reporters will turn in stories that are little more than rumors that seem too good to check. But, while the top editors often demand more reporting and numerous rewrites, they have seldom killed stories. According to everyone at the paper, the only story that Tretyakov refused to run without further questioning was the stuff about the K.G.B. and the Bolshoi Theatre that Karaulov had been trying to peddle to me.

“The reason these kids do things like investigative work is that they not only don’t fear the system—they don’t even respect it,” Zakharov said. “These kids are arrogant, silly, uneducated, and undisciplined, and they live only in the present. They don’t care about yesterday and have no idea that there is nothing new under the sun. But they have no prejudices. They don’t think ahead and wonder if someone at the Kremlin will think this or that about what they do. They just go ahead and do it.”

The young reporters have also changed the language of newspapers. They have dispensed with the wooden bureaucratese and fanatic sloganeering of the Soviet period. “We don’t talk Pravda language,” Parkhomenko said at the printshop.

Before I moved to Russia, I took a course at George Washington University in something my classmates and I called “newspaper Russian.” For weeks, we memorized endless lists of political clichés: “The talks were held in a warm and friendly atmosphere”; “The peace-loving comrade-nations of the world will face the imperialists in a round of negotiations next week”; and so on. It was the language of Novoyaz , or Newspeak, and nowhere had it reached such a level of absurdity as in the Soviet Union. But Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s younger reporters had never had to write that way—or, at least, not for long. While someone like Len Karpinsky still has trouble removing the Novoyaz sludge from his prose—“I try, but I can’t always get it clear”—the Nezavisimaya Gazeta writers work under no such handicap.

“Right away, we tried to imitate Western language,” Parkhomenko said. “In Russian, there had never been the political language of a civilized country. So we adopted phrases like ‘the Yeltsin administration’—how could you talk about ‘the Brezhnev administration,’ or even ‘the Gorbachev administration’? At a certain point, we had to use Western terms for what had become, essentially, Western politics. All the old phrases of Pravda went out the window. The same was true of economics—we had to accommodate ‘investment,’ ‘entrepreneurship,’ and all the rest. Where we don’t imitate the Americans is in the question of point of view. We make no bones about the fact that the reporter is making some evaluation of what has happened. For us, the guarantee of fairness or objectivity is not that the reporter has no opinion but, rather, that the paper as a whole will hold a wide range of opinions.”

Tretyakov likes nothing better than to keep all political sides slightly angry with him. Yeltsin’s former press secretary, Pavel Voshchanov, wrote letters of complaint, expressing incredulity at how an independent newspaper could be so critical of a democratic leader. When Gorbachev’s popularity was at its lowest, last spring, Tretyakov wrote a piece called “Apologia for Gorbachev,” which did not dispute the attacks on Gorbachev but did remind readers of the Soviet President’s accomplishments since he came to power. In the West, the piece might have seemed self-evident, even a last roar of Gorbymania. But in Moscow, where Gorbachev was alone in a political “center” that existed nowhere except in his mind, Tretyakov’s piece, with its insistence on Gorbachev’s extraordinary achievements of ending the Cold War and the arms race, and creating democratic parliaments and a free press, was a contrarian bombshell. The Yeltsin forces wondered just what this new paper was up to. “And that is just the way I like it,” Tretyakov said.

But, of course, it was the August coup and Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s coverage of the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union that insured the paper’s reputation. Even now, months later, there is at the paper a distinct nostalgia for the August events—a longing for the excitement and camaraderie. Small wonder. Vladimir Todres, a twenty-five-year-old political reporter, said that he and his friends at the paper saw the coup as the defining event of their generation—the street-level, media-age equivalent of what the Twentieth Party Congress was for Karpinsky, Gorbachev, and the thaw generation.

“For us, the putsch was not simply a matter of politics,” Todres said. “Usually, we hate politics, to tell you the truth. But this was the Pepsi Generation under threat. Our very existence was in jeopardy. The bikers feared for their motorcycles. The young businessmen worried about their markets. The racketeers even thought about their bottom line and came to defend Yeltsin’s White House. Prostitutes, students, scholars—everybody—had an interest in this new life, and we were just not willing to give it all up to these old men. And, also, it was like being in a great movie. Life and art were all mixed up together. My friends who were abroad were heartbroken, not because they felt fear but because they felt left out. They couldn’t have a part in the movie.”

The journalism part of the movie was splendid. On the first day of the coup, Tretyakov decided not to defy the coup plotters’ press ban. His thinking was that a quick wrong move could endanger the staff and end the paper entirely. Some of the younger reporters were furious, especially after they heard that the printers at Izvestia were willing to defy the ban and work the presses. But Tretyakov insisted. The next day, as it became clearer that the coup leaders had neither the will nor the level of organization to mount a full-scale attack on the press as a whole, Tretyakov and the staff put out a Xeroxed version of Nezavisimaya Gazeta . This “underground” paper carried the lead headline “The Feeble Coup: It Is Still Not Over” and was filled with news about the putsch from Moscow and the provinces. At Moscow News , Karpinsky and editors of some of the other liberal papers published a makeshift Obshchaya Gazeta , or Common Newspaper .

In the meantime, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta reporters were working on the story—especially Parkhomenko and Pavel Felgenhauer, the paper’s defense analyst. Felgenhauer stayed in the White House throughout the three-day siege and was in constant contact with the military leaders planning Yeltsin’s strategy of resistance in their makeshift “war room.” Felgenhauer, a bearlike man who speaks English about as well as the average American college professor, never set out to be a journalist or a military expert. He has a Ph.D. in biology and won what he called “a measure of international fame” with his thesis, “RNA Synthesis During the Maturation of Frog Oocytes.” He told me, “I quit science because you can’t do science anymore in this country. We can’t even afford test tubes, or food for the frogs. So I became a journalist. I always liked to write.”

Felgenhauer had followed military affairs the way some American kids follow baseball. It was all a game, a combination of action and statistics. “Pavel is a kid who likes toy soldiers,” Parkhomenko said. “He’s a gigantic forty-year-old kid who is a genius. He loved the coup, because he got to play soldier and war correspondent all at once.”

Parkhomenko could not believe the look of supreme contentment in his colleague’s eyes as they sat in the White House. “As for me, I was terrified,” he said. “I thought I was a dead man—the romance of the White House is long gone. Now they try to say that it was all nothing, that there was never any danger. But that’s ridiculous. It was all a war of nerves, a dangerous telephone war. There were orders and counter-orders by phone. When the Russian government found out that a contingent of tanks was being sent, its people set up rows of gas cannisters so that there would be a huge explosion. Their strategy all along was to maximize the threat of bloodshed, to scare the shit out of the K.G.B. and the putschists by essentially using unarmed people as a shield. It was not an especially humane strategy, but it worked. The coup guys wanted a surgical operation, and the Russians made that impossible. Thank God, we lived.”

After the coup, the paper no longer seemed very new. What took decades at the New York Times took less than a year at Nezavisimaya Gazeta . Russia has entered the post-Soviet age with Vitaly Tretyakov’s brainchild as the country’s premier newspaper. “We have to face it,” Igor Zakharov said. “We’re the establishment now.” At Moscow News , Karpinsky became editor-in-chief late last August, after Gorbachev and Yeltsin put Yegor Yakovlev in charge of the state television bureaucracy.

The Nezavisimaya Gazeta reporters have discovered that respectability has its advantages. Felgenhauer now says that he gets secret military documents “by the boxful,” simply through the connections he developed while he sat with the Russian generals during the coup. A few months ago, two officers from military intelligence provided him with an exposé of incompetence in the agency. The only details Felgenhauer left out were “about a particularly juicy sex scandal—we have standards, unfortunately.”

Nezavisimaya Gazeta is getting better known all the time. At the moment, “no one exactly owns the paper,” Tretyakov said, but he is in the process of setting up a joint-stock operation, with all the employees investing and holding shares. The paper just made a million rubles from an advertising supplement and is buying I.B.M.-knockoff computers for a newsroom that will no longer resemble the set of “The Front Page.” Nezavisimaya Gazeta ’s reputation has grown so quickly abroad that many émigrés prefer it to New York’s Novoye Russkoye Slovo ( New Russian Word ) or the Paris Russkaya Mysl ( Russian Thought ). You can find the paper in Paris and at a few émigré bookstores in New York. Like Moscow News , Nezavisimaya Gazeta is now published in Russian in Israel, in English in the United States and Britain, and in French in France and other European countries. To get hold of more foreign currency, Tretyakov has started a wire service, called NeGa, so that news bureaus in Moscow can keep up with developments in the Russian provinces and former republics. He is also planning a tabloid (“for the lower-brow reader”), and is thinking about getting into radio and television.

But, while Tretyakov is nearly dizzy with success, he realizes that the euphoria around the paper’s office is long gone. The stretch last year when reporters worked for nothing and with no sleep is a memory. Zakharov is fed up with Tretyakov’s insistence on doing everything himself, and is thinking about quitting. The foreign editor hasn’t been getting along with Tretyakov lately, and he may go, too. Some of the youngest reporters, especially, worry that Tretyakov is becoming as autocratic as his old bosses at Moscow News were.

“In one year, the atmosphere around here has changed completely,” I was told by Yuri Leonov, who is twenty-three and writes about foreign affairs. “In the beginning, we sat together and divided up all the questions and decided things together. Now there is a ruling class. I feel like a rank worker all of a sudden—a peon. No one asks my opinion about anything. When we started out, Vitaly said, ‘Don’t you think we need a union?’ We all laughed, and said, ‘What for? Do you think we need a Communist organization?’ Well, now we have discovered that there is nothing to protect us.”

Tretyakov has listened to these complaints many times. After Tatyana Malkina talked with him for four hours one afternoon, recommending a return to the old, informal ways at the paper, Tretyakov showed up for work wearing a sweater and jeans, and constantly asked for suggestions at the morning editorial meetings. But within a couple of days he was back in his jacket and tie.

“Common sense tells me that two hundred people can’t all be friends,” he said to me. “Those days are over. We can’t continue to work in chaos. We can’t have people drinking in the office or Misha Leontiev coming late to every editorial meeting. I have to keep reminding people that this was my idea—I started this paper. If we run this place like a party, we can come up with a few euphoric issues and can all congratulate one another. But that is no way to run a newspaper month after month after month. We are a business now. That’s the brave new world. It’s time we recognized it.”

Just as Tretyakov finished on that stern note, there was a knock at his door. The entire staff had assembled, bearing gifts: a huge bunch of carnations and an eight-pack of Swedish cheese slices. “Remember,” said Tatyana Malkina, the head of the delegation. “We’ll always love you.” Vitaly Tretyakov blushed. It was his birthday. He had forgotten, but the staff had not. He was forty years old. ♦

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COMMENTS

PDF 1992 Trek Catalog
1992 Trek Catalog This is an extract from the 1992 Trek Catalog. It contains details on the two steel-framed road bikes that Trek made this year: models 520 and 400. Pages 2 and 3 contain an introduction to, and geometry of, the 520 and 400 plus tandem bikes. Page 4 contains details of the 520 and 400. It is followed by two tables that contain
Trek Bike Models by Year and Color
91, yellow with black splash with black decals on silver and blue. 92, black with green decals. 93, ice silver with black splash with black decals. 94, ice green with white decals. 99, metal flake green with gold decals. 00, candy red. 01, Trek red with white trim. 02, starry night. 03, Baja blue.
Trek 800 Bike Bike 1998 or Older
Our Trek Antelope 800 was a wedding gift that my parents purchased when they got married, they got it as a Christmas present. Our 1993 Antelope 800 has over 6,000 miles on it, and is still rolling. Trek bicycles are built for quality and reliability, and I will be keeping my Antelope 800 for years to come. ...
Bike Forums
Here's my original Trek 800 Antelope just before I sold it after picking up a 1999 Peugeot Mtn. bike that was in fantastic shape. I'm embarrassed to say it was well neglected over the years. This is a silly question - but the Trek 800 Antelope didn't have fenders as original equipment, right?
1992 Trek 800 Antelope
Green 1992 Trek 800 Antelope, serial: T2EB16296 BI0415. Vintage hard tail mountain bike.
Trek 800 (A Detailed Review)
The Trek 800 mountain bike is a versatile bike that can handle various terrains, from smooth pavement to rough trails. Its sturdy steel frame and reliable components make it a powerful bike that can handle the rigors of mountain biking and commuting alike. When it comes to mountain biking, the Trek 800 is a great entry-level bike.
1992 Trek Bikes 800 Base
Rigid MTB bike with 6 sizes. Find your ideal bike using bike-on-bike geometry comparisons with diagrams, powerful search tools, and category analysis.
Trek 800 Antelope
Trek 800 Antelope. Commuter/touring bike. Cro-moly frame 1992. Nothing special, but it's a pretty bomb-proof bike. Frame: 4130 Cro-Moly, double butted. Fork/Headset: Stock/ Cro moly. Crankset/Bottom Bracket: FSA Comet Triple, 44/34/22, external bearing BB. Pedals: Shimano PD-M545 clipless w/ platform.
trek antelope 800 for sale
MEN'S 1992 TREK 800 ANTELOPE FOREST GREEN 21 SPEED MOUNTAIN BIKE 16.5" FRAME. Opens in a new window or tab. Pre-Owned. $225.00. 508*whitman (4,027) 100%. Buy It Now. Free local pickup. 11 watchers. Results matching fewer words. 2001 Trek 820 Antelope MTB Bike 16.5" Small Hardtail Chromoly Rigid USA Shipper!
Antelope of the Now: Trek 800
Trek Antelope 800, gold, 42 cm, 15 speed, 26″ wheels, quick release seat & front wheel, new Kenda Kwest tires, center pull brakes, Shimano Alivio derailleur in back, SunTour α 3000 derailleur in front. $300. Trek has a reputation for being both sturdy & nimble; ...
Trek 800: All in One Review
Trek 800 Antelope. The Trek 800 Antelope has garnered a reputation as a durable and reliable mountain bike among riders. A key reason for its popularity is its high-tensile strength frame, built to withstand harsh outdoor conditions while maintaining optimal comfort levels during rides. This model offers the following features:
90s Trek MTBs
Trek 800 Antelope Sport Trail (1992) Tange Cro-moly Trek tapered Cro-moly stays High Tensile ATB fork 14.5, 16.5, 18, 20, 22, 24" and 17" women's. Black Forest Green w/ White decals White w/ Black Splash and Red decals. Drivetrain: Shimano M102 ...
1992 Trek Antelope 800
Black 1992 Trek Antelope 800, serial: T0DZ25308.
Trek 800 Review: Is It a Good Bike or Waste of Money? (2024)
The Trek 800 was equipped with 26-inch wheels, which are nimble and allow for quick acceleration but are not as fast, stable, or comfortable as 27.5 or 29-inch wheels. In today's market, it's rare to find adult mountain bikes with 26-inch wheels. They are primarily used for kids' mountain bikes and dirt bikes.
MEN'S 1992 TREK 800 ANTELOPE FOREST GREEN 21 SPEED MOUNTAIN BIKE ...
MEN'S 1992 TREK 800 ANTELOPE FOREST GREEN 21 SPEED MOUNTAIN BIKE 16.5" FRAME. 508*whitman (4018) 100% positive; Seller's other items Seller's other items; Contact seller; ... 800 Antelope. Department. Men. Bike Type. Hardtail Bike. Material. Chromoly. Handlebar Type. Riser Bar. Frame Size. 16.5 in. Model Year. 1992. Gear Change Mechanism ...
Bike Forums
They were intended to go to Rusty Spoke, but the Spoke is chock full o' bikes at the moment, and a few of them need their shifters either degunked or replaced. I've seen them as entirely worthy of rebuilding, as they typically have good frames, decent components, and better-than-zero resale value. Post 22743100 - BikeForums is the leading ...
Medal "In Commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of Moscow"
The Medal "In Commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of Moscow" was a 37mm in diameter circular copper medal designed by SL Tulchinsky and I I Dubasov. The rim was convex and all the inscriptions and images were in relief. The obverse bore the helmeted left profile of Yuri Dolgorukiy. In the lower half, along the medal circumference, the ...
1992 Trek 800 Antelope
Green 1992 Trek 800 Antelope, serial: T1LB43144.
What Moscow Was Like After Dissolution of USSR in 1992
What Life Was Like on Moscow's Streets After the USSR Collapsed. As we all know, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is no more. It has ceased to be. It has rung down the curtain and joined ...
The ghost of Russia's past wars comes back to haunt Moscow
Gunmen in an entertainment venue. Bodies lying on the cold concrete. Horror that such murder could strike the safety of the Moscow bubble.
Moscow, a Newspaper City
David Remnick meets the city's best-known newspaper editors, including the founder of Nezavisimaya Gazeta—"the closest thing Russia has ever had to a Western daily," he wrote, in 1992.