The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 some 70 years after its grimly riveting and highly expectant Marxist-Leninist beginning ranks alongside World War I as the two most singularly pivotal events of the Twentieth Century. In a sense, both are conjoined, with the War providing the decisive finishing blow to what remained of both the totteringly indecisive Romanov dynasty and centuries of turgid, slow-to-change Russian autocracy. Lenin and Trotsky's ability in October 1917 to "pick the Revolution up off the street," if not guaranteed, certainly was facilitated by the disaster on the Eastern Front.

Contained between the Great War, which rather than "ending all wars" ironically triggered a crescendo of successors, and the House of Usher -- like disintegration of the Soviet system and empire, lies an historical framework, a chessboard if you will, of moves and countermoves whereupon geo-political reality is played out for at least three generations.

Follow up:

As a child during World War II the kids in the neighborhood vied for who among us would play the heroic Russian soldiers in our seemingly endless games of "war." The "dirty and cruel Nazis" routinely were on the receiving end of dubious "Molotov cocktails" made from Coke or Dr. Pepper bottles filled with water and plugged at the top by available strips of torn undershirt. In winter the Germans usually got pelted, while the "yellow Jap bastards" took it on the chin in the warmer months when hordes of invisible banzai charges, launched across the Sears parking lot opposite my house, easily were deflected by counterattacks led by us Wheeler Street "marines."

A child's remembrances can be difficult to resurrect but I recall with unusual clarity listening to a radio in a neighbor's living room, maybe in late 1945, listening to an animated announcer -- perhaps the arch-conservative Fulton Lewis, Jr. -- testily protest the growing perfidy of one of my childhood heroes, the twinkle-eyed, black-mustached Joseph Stalin. I wasn't quite sure what the "marshal" in front of his name stood for. Come of think of it, I also remember that Chiang Kai-shek, another trusted war ally, went by the fancy title, "generalismo," and to this day I'm not entirely clear as to that term's origin.

But what really struck me as an eight-year-old was that the Russians, the gutsy good guys of a host of WW II Hollywood propaganda movies, overnight had become our number one enemy. That radio broadcast then was my earliest introduction to the Cold War. The following year my favorite WWI hero, Winston Churchill, sealed for me the propriety of the term with his justly acclaimed "Iron Curtain" speech delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Snippets of the oratory were put on Twentieth Century Fox's Movietone newsreel that played at our local movie house. I can still see Churchill peering down his nose and over his eyeglasses, jowls at half-mast, hands clasping what amounted to the lapels of his ornate graduation gown, stammering out as only he could, something about "Stetin in the Baltic and Trieste in the Adriatic."

One reason the Churchillian metaphor stuck fast in my mind was because Hollywood's Russian-born Jewish movie makers, always more patriotic and chauvinistically American than Uncle Sam, turned now 180° and began making anti-Russian, anti-Communist films, the first of which naturally was "The Iron Curtain," a crackerjack spy thriller based on the defection of a Russian embassy code clerk in Canada; a few years later the McCarthy days were upon us and so was "Big Jim McClain," a tendentious potboiler featuring John Wayne hunting Commies in Hawaii, of all places.

Memories of the Cold War scroll by: radio updates strongly suggesting that Truman might send our tanks down the highway to a Stalin-blockaded Berlin; newsboys shouting "Extra!" and headlines in the afternoon Houston Chronicle proclaiming in three-inch type that "REDS HAVE A-BOMB." Newsreels showing that same Generalissimo disembarking for Formosa; Alger Hiss looking so regal and so innocent; Julius Rosenberg looking so Jewish and so guilty; Joe McCarthy looking and acting like a bully and Edward R. Murrow -- who in another life I planned to come back as -- raking the Senator over the coals; General MacArthur's magnificent, emotionally-charged speech to a Congress fed up with our inability to win in Korea; Hungarians moving to Houston in 1957; yellow-colored sirens screeching out from seemingly every post office and federal building in the land each Friday noon, gearing up in case of a real live Russian attack.

Hitching rides in front of Bergstrom Air Force base outside Austin with acres of camouflaged B-52s as a prairie backdrop. The SAC logo of lightening bolts tightly clutched in a knight's mailed fist and the proud motto "Peace is our Profession!" Taking Russian in 1957 because football players at the University of Texas spread the word that the profs were easy, only to have Sputnik force the University to require a toughening of the Slavonic language program, and thus forcing me to double up in the summer in order to graduate before the expected arrival of a more rigorous regimen taught by real Russians.

And, of course, the fear, helplessness, and combative bravado brought out by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when one didn't know if a nuclear Armageddon was in the offing or, as was more likely, a highly charged contest of bluff. And how it interrupted a love affair that had all the earmarks of being made in heaven.

The Kennedy killing, the Vietnam War, a stint in Afghanistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer where I met Russians on a regular basis up close and for the first time, all of this and more prepared me to believe that the Cold War and the ongoing presence of the Soviet Union, not to mention Communist China, was a reality check for my time, a fact of life that had to be met head on without evasion and certainly not through the rose-colored glasses of a new American Left, the existence of which proved one of the greatest blows to my sense of political prescience.

I accepted the arms race in those years without blinking and was prepared to believe nothing less than that "these people (the Communists) were man-eating cannibals, out to eat us up," to quote a great "Amen brother!" line uttered by Gregory Peck in one of the last rather well-done anti-Communist movies, "Night People." In the eyes of the growing host of revisionist American historians, such a person as I have described, was by every definition an unreconstructed, unredeemable "cold warrion." And a "cold warrion" I remained until the Evil Empire seemingly without the merest hint or notice went "poof" and was no more.

This essay seeks to determine how that seemingly redoubtable and indefatigable foe so aptly limned out for me in Churchill's Churchillian prose of March 1946 could prove by March (August, December?) 1991 to be so vulnerable and so clearly the real "paper tiger" of the Cold War.

The case can be made that the sources available to answer the above question begin with historians who offer systemic reasons for the Fall; the argument here being that the communist qua totalitarian system was flawed from the beginning, therefore it was only a matter of time before its contradictions caught up with it. George Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram and subsequent highly celebrated "Mr. X" essay staked out this ground early on, albeit his original prediction foretold that a sixteen-year timeline probably would suffice for this self-immolation to manifest itself rather than the forty-plus years that in fact transpired from the date of his predictions to 1989-91 and what the historian Martin Malia has dubbed the "Great Collapse."

Of the many books recently to appear on this topic, none is as harshly condemnatory of Western scholarship in this matter as Professor Mali's "The Soviet Tragedy" (1994). In prose sprinkled here and there with invective and rueful recollections, Western intellectuals, particularly those who engaged in what Mali condemns as flawed social science, i.e., the Sovietologists, are roundly condemned for contributing to the prolonged Soviet tenure in power.

Their guilt lies, he avers, in the fact that they failed to face up to the totality represented by Soviet Communism. This lapse in judgment amounted to an exercise in deceptive labeling. The tendency to use social science euphemisms like "authoritarianism, " "pluralism," and "developmental dictatorship," when applied to the soviet system, he argues, in fact played into the hands of the Soviet leadership and even was adopted by the latter to justify its legitimacy. Employing the words of Solzhenitsyn, Mali charges these scholars with living "according to the lie."

Khruschev's de-Stalinization period was thus viewed as the beginning of the end of the "totalitarian" model, and model soon to be replaced by a theory of modernizing economic development worthy of emulation in the expanding Third World. In other words, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods were interpreted by the likes of Stephen Cohen and Jerry Hough as "democratizing" phases softened by a "democratization" coming from below.

Mali places American historiography squarely in the dock for much of this, particularly when it went so far as to assume that the original 1917 October Revolution reflected an original proletarian uprising "generated by class 'polarization' between workers and capitalists," not, as he would have it, "a minority coup d'etat made possible by the 'accident' of the First World War."

Mali charges the "revisionists" not only stuck to the old chestnut that Stalinism represented an aberration departure from the more kind-hearted tenets of Leninism but that a second generation of similarly-minded scholars have even claimed that early Stalinism had "democratic" qualities and that the massive industrial growth associated with the draconian Five Year Plans, in effect, lifted substantial boats within the society. But most damning, in Mali's eyes, was the revisionists' assessment that the politics of the mature Soviet Union was characterized by a kind of interest-group liberalism that existed widely in other "developed societies."

All of this reflects Mali's deeply held conviction that the fall of the Soviet system was predetermined by the very fact that its founding socialist premise was a chimera. In his words, the Bolsheviks had created a "unique system" held together by the totalitarian troika of party, plan (its command economy), and the police, or brute force and terror.

This "Sovietism" (his word) remained essentially intact from October 1917 right up to the 1991 collapse. Its uniqueness, moreover, is best proved by the extraordinary totality of the disintegration: the ideology, the political structure, and the economy, crumbled as if one, followed hard upon by its total repudiation, not only by the intelligentsia which for years had been nibbling away at its raison de'etre, but a majority of the public as well.

All of this, Mali argues, is an example of Hegel's notion of the "cunning of history," or, in modern parlance, history's unveiling of unintended consequences: Columbus starts out for China and discovers America; the Bolsheviks set sail for socialism and end up with Sovietism.

So the Soviet Union, a failed utopia, never became a developed or modern nation; instead, it was a hybrid form of despotism all its own that never obtained adequate and fair scrutiny in the West. Why? Because of the sanctified position socialism enjoyed among the Western intellectual elite.

The paradox is that at no other time in history has such a monumental failure been held up as such an irresistible success. And the reason this was so was because what was at stake in the Soviet experiment was nothing short of "universal socialism;" and no stone could be left unturned in order to find the philosopher's stone divining its success. But in the final analysis it turned out to be nothing more than an ideology and a failed one at that. "Soviet Man" then was the equivalent of a "Potemkin Village" or, better yet, a "Stakhanov" miner whose legendary productivity was a sham; in sort, "the man who never was!"

Perhaps it should not surprise that this notion of a flawed founding and, by implication, wretched founders, is echoed by recent Russian historians, many, for the first time, encouraged not only to think independently but to publish the fruits gleaned from access to hitherto secret archives and files. General Dmitri Volkogonov, a former official Soviet military historian and author of an unlikely warts-and-all biography of Stalin, said, in an interview with David Remnick that appeared in the latter's Pulitzer Prize winning "Lenin's Tomb" (1994) that "the roots of [the] catastrophe lay in the ideology itself, in Leninism." Bolshevism, claimed the General, "gave rise to the totalitarian state." To Volkogonov, the recent concerted move by the reformers against the Soviet leadership was a "mutiny" represented by groping through "an intellectual and spiritual fog."

To Walter Laqueur, a leading neo-conservative historian, the "collapse" was the result of a multitude of weaknesses that eventuated not so much in a revolution in 1991 as a "disintegration" of the spirit. As to the "flawed beginning" argument made so passionately by Mali, Laqueur demurs by insisting that the quest to remake human nature set forth in Lenin's ideology fails in adequately explaining why such institutional stupidity reigned over a stretch of seventy years.

To Laqueur, the nature of the totalitarian state, not the flawed ideology, was to blame for the persistence of the Soviet hammerlock on power. Until 1991 no totalitarian state had collapsed of its own volition without being defeated militarily. As with Volkogonov above, Laqueur found a host of recent Russian scholars ready to embrace this theory of totalitarianism in order to better understand the failure of the heavy-handed Soviet system that they so long had been compelled to endure.

For persistent clarity and insight into the multitudinous factors pointing toward Mali's "Great Collapse," no one beats Laqueur's list of winners; an economy in free fall whose slowdown began as early as the Sixties; an almost total absence of consumer goods of any consistent quantity or quality; defense spending higher than anticipated; a series of ecological disasters and disaster areas; a rise in alcoholism to 37 percent for working class males by the late 1970s; and most glaringly, the legacy of cronyism and Mafia-like satraps, particularly in the Soviet republics, either established or allowed during the Brezhnev period. As a result of the latter, anything could be obtained if one had the money, from a university position to a job as a party apparachik. And the police and judiciary were the most corrupt of all.

There was also the increasingly ubiquitous presence of abject poverty; peasants on run-down collective farms, old age pensioners, single women, low-paid occupational workers -- including teachers -- frequently reduced to a penury that proved the lie of the failed utopia.

The accumulation of journalistic accounts gathered inside the Soviet Union as far back as the Brezhnev era -- one thinks of the work of Hedrick Smith and Robert Kaiser -- added to the recent reportage of Remnick and David Satter, ("Age of Delirium," [1996]) is replete with countless interviews of bitterly cynical peasants; opportunistic underground economic operatives; desperately disgruntled half-drunk miners; victims of Chernobyl; dissident inmates of punitively designed psychiatric hospitals; "wannabe" emigrees caught at the border trying to escape; the glazed-eyed, doggedly passive occupants of endless queues; and a seemingly nonstop list of Jewish refesenik intellectuals pouring out agonizing tale after tale of family persecution and betrayal under Stalin and Brezhnev and censorship and artistic oppression down to the present. Such overwhelming anecdotal evidence of pathos and failure begs the question of why it took so long for the population to emerge from under the rubble? Particularly after the Stalinist Terror had abated rather early on!

Laqueur's answer to this fundamental question is that the people had become so inured to their predicament that they simply accepted it as a wretched mean, a condition they gradually had acclimatized themselves to. Indeed, when change and reform first began to be talked up the initial reaction from the rank-and-file Soviet citizen was suspicion and a fearful uncertainty.

And then there was the pesky nationality problem. But, according to Laqueur, with the exception of the Baltic republics, which had long-standing and well-grounded complaints pertaining to their deracinated inclusion into the Soviet Union, and the egregious economic exploitation of the Central Asian lands, most of the republics were no worse off than they had been under the czar.

No, Laqueur clearly holds that the basic cause of the collapse falls more within the framework of a "spiritual" or "moral" crisis brought on by the accumulated effect of all the above. This, by the way, pretty much sums up the conclusion reached by Remnick and Satter, which if not boldly stated, certainly is implied by virtue of the weight of the evidence gleaned from their mountain of interviews.

In short, these were a people, including even some within the Communist Party, who had reached the end of their moral tether. Hardly any inhabitants accepted all of the old ideology, but only a few rejected it all; for it wasn't anti-communism, according to Laqueur, that confirmed their pervasive pessimism, but all-purpose indifference. Thus Laqueur's "disintegration" views as opposed to the more dramatic notion of a revolution.

The explanation of the "sudden" nature of the collapse would have to be sought elsewhere. There must have been a "crisis, " Laqueur opined, but it simply was not to be "quantified."

One indicator that has been tabulated, if not quantified, to everyone's satisfaction is that of the Soviet economy. It is know, for example, that in the 60s and 70s Soviet productivity in steel and coal caught up with and even surpassed that of the United States. But declines already had commenced in labor productivity and the quality of machine tools, while advances in science and technology increasingly proved illusory.

Nevertheless, economic reports drawn by Western experts basically found that the Soviet situation, while somewhat gloomy, was still redeemable. These half-way optimistic measurements were even seized upon by the Soviet leadership to buttress their own traditionally overly optimistic assessment. Consumer goods, meanwhile, increased in number during these years but the distribution system was so broken down that milk rarely got delivered before souring and, though Soviets produced more shoes than anyone else in the world, customers were forced to stand in line time and again to buy several pairs because the sizes were so askew that it was necessary to acquire many pairs to make a fit. Housing meanwhile was atrocious with couples required to wait years before qualifying for a small apartment; the wait for cars also dragged on interminable, and after one finally arrived, it was not unusual for it almost immediately to experience mechanical problems.

Defense costs, furthermore, were eating up an inordinate portion of Soviet expenditures. Because of the difficulty in measuring the Soviet GNP it was not always clear what percentage was being spent to this end. Experts now claim the West routinely underestimated the numbers. It is now believed that in years just prior to 1991 as much as 30 percent of the economy went toward the defense sector putting an enormous burden on the average citizen in terms of delayed consumer satisfaction. Then there were the costs incurred by shoring up overseas adventures such as those in Africa, not to mention the drain of the war in Afghanistan and the expense involved in maintaining Castro's lifeline.

But all of this is preliminary to asking and attempting to answer what clearly has become the hottest and most ideologically-fraught issue pertaining to the close of the Cold War, namely the extent to which America's acceleration of the arms race impacted the Soviet Union so as to hasten her fall from power.

Part of the fiery debate arises from parsing the role played by Ronald Reagan; indeed, the Reagan Presidency for years has been the favorite target of much of the clatter of historiographic musketry. Out of this has strangely emerged a battle for Reagan's soul. Left-leaning historians claim it was Reagan's affability and outreach to an equally charming and receptive Gorbyachev that included the Russian leader toward accepting as genuine Reagan's stated opposition to nuclear weapons offered at the 1985 Geneva Summit. And that Reagan's peace-through-strength rhetoric was in keeping with the tried and tested formula of his predecessors; in other words, Reagan was simply the extension of the chastened, post-Afghanistan Jimmy Carter, a view that to some extent is shared by former CIA chief Robert Gates, who in his recent memoir reflects on the fact that Carter indeed had committed to a recharged anti-insurgency in Afghanistan long before Reagan -- through William Casey -- turned over Stinger missiles to the Muhajadeen.

But much can be said for Reagan's Evil Empire speech, not to mention the decision to employ Pershing missiles in Europe, as attention-getting wakeup calls to the Soviet leadership. Edwin Meese, attorney general and close confident of Ronald Reagan, argues in his Reagan-era memoir that the Russian leadership, before and after the arrival of Gorby'achev, became convinced that Reagan's pedal-to-the-metal arms' buildup, particularly is proclaimed interest in the Strategic Defense Initiative or, as proclaimed by foes in the press and Congress, "Star Wars," would lead to further disruption in the Soviet economy. In order to keep up and build their own or a similar project economic bankruptcy might well ensue.

Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institute Fellow, has devoted an entire book, to demonstrating how decisive Reagan's anti-Communist strategy was in bringing down the "Evil Empire." While much of the book amounts to a celebration of William Casey's ability to strike a blow at the enemy via his fabled access to Reagan and his CIA leadership prerogatives (constant trips throughout the world on a secret black-painted CIA airliner are highlighted), it nevertheless develops a credible scenario, if not for the single-handed toppling of the Soviet Union, at least for providing a push sufficient to help tumble it into history's much remarked upon dustbin.

To Schweizer, Casey, always with Reagan's imprimatur to back him up, is able to work wonders, in some cases simply through his banking and big business contact. He is able, for example, to quash low-interest loans to the Soviets; to clamp down on the export of Western technology the Russians are employing to maintain their crumpling industrial base; to make it tougher for the Russians to complete a huge natural gas pipeline that would, if ever properly completed, provide them with much-needed Western hard currency;; and finally through astute jawboning and clever parceling out of quid pro quos in the form of military intelligence and high-tech weaponry to strategic allies, especially the Saudis, the United States is able to convince the latter to substantially increase oil production and thus in one blow enhance the American economy by reducing oil prices while concurrently devastating the Soviet Union's major source of income, namely their export of petroleum.

This American-induced drop in oil prices also makes it more difficult for purchasers of Soviet arms such as Iraq, Iran, and Libya to continue their brisk acquisition of high-tech Soviet weaponry, thus leading to a further diminishment of Soviet income. Furthermore, large planned industrial projects such as a Renault car factory, two British chemical plants, and the purchase of Japanese and U.S. machinery are forced to be scrapped for lack of hard currency.

But it's the specter of SDI that apparently had become a major fixation in the minds of both the Soviet strategic defense hierarchy as well as Gorbyachev himself. Not only do Reagan defenders point this out, but much of the evidence stems from reports provided by the Russian leaders themselves. From wiley old Andrei Gromyko to highly-ranked Soviet army officers to KGB officials, the assumption early on was that it was Reagan's intent to wreck the Soviet economy on the shoals of the arms race.

And to Gorbyachev it was becoming increasingly clear that in order to reform the Soviet economy it first would be necessary to reduce substantially the enormous expenditure going to their military-industrial complex. In fact, the impromptu Iceland Summit in 1986 in large measure centered on Gorbyachev's attempt to convince Reagan of the importance of scrapping SDI.

One theory is that following Khrushchev's embarrassment over the pullout of missiles from Cuba, the Soviet's full-speed-ahead military buildup provoked the West into a competition that was unwinnable for the Soviet side. Laqueur quotes Valentin Falin, former Soviet ambassador to Germany, who, in speaking apropos of the arms race, said that "Detente would never have resulted in the tearing down of the Iron Curtain."

In the controversy that has raged nonstop over the weight the arms race bears on the collapse, Laqueur remains on the sideline offering that while it may or may not have been decisive, it surely was one of the causes of what he labels the "crisis" that led to the eventual "downfall." But he relishes pointing out the embarrassing petard the revisionists now find themselves hoisted upon in this matter; after all, it was they who proclaimed longly and loudly that the arms race was an "unmitigated disaster" which impacted Soviet policy only in ways detrimental to the West. They clearly now have something to answer for.

The other big theory which seeks to account for the fall of the Soviet Union deals primarily with what one might call a "toppling from within" brought on by the rush to reform. In other words, once Gorbyachev pried loose the gate to reform he discovered, to his dismay, that he inadvertently had opened a floodgate.

Michael Mandelbaum, in a piece in Foreign Affairs, nails down this interpretation as succinctly as anyone: when Gorbyachev set off on the road to Glasnost he opened public access to the past and present and without knowing it, greased the skids for the "Great Collapse." Thinking he would clear the way for needed economic reforms by requiring access to meaningful statistical information, and desirous of rectifying the more egregious crimes of Stalin and Brezhnev by freeing thousands of dissidents, he, in fact, wrought more than he bargained for.

Hitherto the mass of Soviet people, in order to cope with the police state and its duplicitous house of mirrors, had withdrawn into themselves, leaving the public arena to the party and government apparatchiks. But, according to Mandelbaum, once Borcyachev authorized "democratization" or free and fair elections in order to undermine his party opponents, the newly empowered electorate voted to reject party and Gorbyachev alike. The longheld view of the party that the people were loyal spear carriers for the regime, appreciative of the victory over Germany in WW II and the supposed nominal advancement in living standards that followed, proved a totally flawed assumption. Elections in 1989 and 1990 indicated that in Russia the electorate was anti-Communist and pro-Boris Yeltsin, the latter a figure emerging in the eyes of the public as a trustworthy maverick. Meanwhile in the non-Russian republics, the newly enfranchised voters, who, like their brethren in Russia, possessed for the first time a real choice of candidates, proved to be loyal to the no-longer nascent nationalism Glasnost had caused to awaken.

No one builds the case for viewing Glasnost (in Russian, "opening" or "public airing of problems") as the overpowering cause of the fall of the Soviet state better than does Scott Shane, yet another of the crew of top-flight American journalists who were on the scene and whose witness to this key moment in history proved wisely informed. Shane, like Smith and Kaiser before him, and his more recent contemporaries Remnick and Satter, is an Ivy League-trained scholar cum reporter, in Shane's case for the Baltimore Sun, who speaks and reads the Russian language with uncommon fluency for an American. And like his reportorial kinsmen, he occasionally slips his objective moorings the better to authenticate his liberal bona fides, but, this notwithstanding, the work of these men is characterized by a clear-eyed ability to go beneath the surface and come up with weighty analyses.

Shane, in his book Dismantling Utopia (1994), dismisses Gorbyachev's charismatic personality and the intriguing power plays of Soviet politics as catalytic factors in the downfall of the regime in favor of the role played by the newly-proffered availability of "information." "Information," Shane boldly asserts, "slew the totalitarian giant."

Simply put, Shane's argument is that for seventy years the Soviet leadership held a monopoly on information and in so doing, acquired and maintained power. This resulted in "blindfolding the regime" to a phony reality of its own making. Gorbyachev saw this fraudulent picture as one of the major reasons the economy was substandard and hoped by slowly and judiciously releasing information to jump start productivity while at the same time plowing under the encrusted bureaucracy he viewed rightly as one of the major impediments to economic growth.

Shane brilliantly compares the age-old censorship that existed under the Czar with the system of information-control established by the Bolshevik regime. For one thing, the astounding increase in literacy achieved by the Communist system paradoxically compelled the Reds to clamp down the information lid. After all, so many readers were now potential consumers of the printed word and thus in jeopardy of being swayed the wrong way, all the more reason to eliminate free press and speech.

Secondly, since the Reds came to power by means of a coup facilitated in part by anti-Czarist and anti-Kerensky handbills and newspapers, who give potential opponents the means to overthrow one's hard-earned handiwork. And thirdly, because of the need to disseminate the Soviet's "messianic ideology," the state was bound to pursue such an end unimpeded by contrasting ideologies. Intellectuals, furthermore, would be enlisted as Stalin so aptly put it, as "the engineers of human souls."

Shane is best when portraying how the Communist-controlled economy confounded the role "pricing" plays in determining what works and doesn't in the real world. It was the freeing up of prices that Gorbyachev, with the help of clear-eyed economic advisors, foresaw as the key to improving the Soviet economy. But with the implementation of competitive pricing it was clear the public, as well as the arteriosclerotic system of collective farms and command-driven industries, hadn't a clue how to react: they had no sense of what a competitive system required. Shane quotes an eighty-year-old Orthodox priest's reaction to it all: "There's no hope, because there's no faith. People don't believe in God. They don't believe in the Communist party. They've forgotten how to work."

Richly ironic is the role the KGB played in unleashing the early "perestroika" or "restructuring" campaign in the late 80s that subsequently led to Glasnost and collapse. The "security state" alone by virtue of its bureaucracy of data gathers and informers had a rather accurate picture of the sorry state the country was in and thus understood better than anyone the need for reform. With this in view "perestroika," as originally envisioned both by Gorbachev and the KGB was in implementation, if not design, vague. The general idea was to strive for technological modernization, greater discipline, and an end to corruption; and the hope was that such a campaign would vindicate Soviet ideology, not denigrate it. But the program's opacity proved its undoing.

For when ordinary people found more out about the outside world and their own history, they increasingly ignored "perestroika" and commenced openly to turn against the regime in favor of the growing feeling that at long last they might be able to obtain a "normal country," a country without shortages and where people could read, say, and write what they wanted without fear. This notion became even more dramatic in the republics where old nationalistic yearnings surfaced and rapidly gained popular currency.

To Shane this dissipation of "fear" was crucial in bringing down the regime. When long held dissidents returned from the camps and told their stories; when the works of pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were allowed to freely circulate; when in 1987 the movie "Repentance," an incredibly deft allegory condemning the evils of a mythical Georgia dictator -- widely interpreted by audiences to be Stalin -- was shown throughout the country; and when all these things happened without arrests and recriminations then indeed the people were ready to believe a "new country" could very well be in the offing.

Particularly compelling was the recounting of the millions of slain innocents. An estimated 75 million people in the Soviet Union had relatives either killed or imprisoned at the hand of state terror with the executed alone approaching 35 million. Both Remnick and Satter tell grisly stories of the exhuming of a series of KGB burial pits discovered by a handful of determined souls morally stricken by the need to reclaim the past. Moreover, in the Baltic states and Ukraine the Glasnost-driven revelations of the tainted fruit of the Nazis-Soviet pact and the "terror famine" respectively played into the hands of the growing independence movements afoot in those regions.

It comes as no surprise that the press and television in particular played central roles in the Glasnost spectacle. What is revealing is the zest with which Soviet newspaper and magazine editors and television producers fled from the confines of the party line to the realm of objectivity in reporting news and openness in offering commentary. Equally worth noting is the public's rush to read and watch what these truth seekers and tellers had to say.

Gorbyachev, who properly was heralded for his photogenic personality, had for a time wooed successfully goodly chunks of the Soviet citizenry, not to mention a growing assemblage of Western leaders and CNN views from around the globe. His skill in this realm, however, caused him to overreach and he was forced to pay a price.

This is seen in the General Secretary's decision to allow TV coverage of the first Congress of People's Deputies where a handful of critics were granted the opportunity to take a crack at the excesses of the party and the KGB. And while few Soviet citizens possessed a car, almost every house and apartment from Moldavia to Sakhalin sprouted a TV antenna. The impact on the public of such exposure was palpable and spawned the demand for even more openness, a demand met with a flood of anything-goes TV news and talk shows which became overnight hits. Eventually TV personalities would be among those elected to the new parliament. And rock and roll was waiting in the wings, an early indicator of the rapid alienation of Soviet youth from the what had gone before.

Gorbyachev even granted permission for polling of the population. The All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion compiled results between 1989 and 1991 seeking answers to sweeping ideological questions such as "does the Community Party deserve your trust" and the public's reaction to the violent Soviet invasion of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in January 1991.

It's Shane's opinion that all of this accumulated from 1987 to 1991 in a withering away of what he calls the "Soviet illusion" and that the "word picture had been wrecked not by tanks and bombs but by facts and opinions, by the release of information bottled up for decades."

It should be clear by now that this paper does not attempt to connect the dots of significant political and economic events from Gorbyachev's rise to leadership in 1985 to the aborted coup of August 1991; nor do I seek to bring closure by addressing the Yeltsin era. But some "dots" were unquestionably major. Gorbyachev's design to hold free elections in March 1989, the first since 1917, comes to mind, as does permitting Sukharov permission to speak at the May 1989 meeting of the Congress of People's Deputies. Allowing Poland and East Germany to break free in 1989 certainly warrants consideration along with the decision to repeal Article Six of the Soviet Constitution, thus allowing non-Communist parties permission to compete for power ranks high indeed. Zbignew Breszinski on PBS, for example, claimed this decision occasioned the end of Bolschevism and the beginning of a form of neo-Menshivism or democratic socialism. The aborted invasion of Vilnius mentioned above no doubt will have its votaries among future historians. After all, it severely tarred Gorbyachev's image as peacemaker. And there are those who will see Yeltsin's role in determinedly pushing Russian nationalism, a role that reached its apogee with his leap atop the tank during the coup attempt, as decisively important as any. The list seemingly is endless. Take your pick!

With a nod to Thomas Carlyle's view that "great men" command history, one cannot escape Gorbyachev's presence in all this. The fact that he still is lionized by the liberal left, at least in the West, does not go unnoticed. He pops up now at this world peace conference and that ecological fest, his financial future assured as speaking fees will carry him far into the next century. But it will not be forgotten that not only did he live and die via his public image (the Russians soured on him at a remarkably early date) but that he sincerely believed in the soundness of socialism, believing that all that was needed to set the system right was to lift the heavy hand of the nomenklutura and toadying apparatchiks. Success, he thought, would follow. He was proved wrong. At heart he was a Marxist-Leninist and evidence suggests he remains one to this day.