As a teenager in 1986 he spent a month as a exchange student at Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Md. It was partial fulfillment of a dream outlined two years before by Ronald Reagan who said he looked to a time when "Americans and Soviet citizens travel freely back and forth, visit each others' homes, look up friends and professional colleagues, and if they feel like it, sit up all night talking about the meaning of life."

The dream became reality, and two years after Aleksey returned home to Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed, in effect, the end of the cold war. Several years after that, Al