The Grand Failure:

...teaching works no instant transformations, and it never eradicates the Old Adam, but at the slow pace of human learning, ideas do affect peoples and nations...

...in production and power...

...As debt devours savings and the economic thunderheads gather, it is worth noting mat nothing would'revive Communist ideology like a major recession in the West...

...At bottom, Brzezinski's trenchant critique is an indictment of Lenin's conviction that revolutionary will, informed by Marxist science, can transform history's objectivities...

...Reformers will encounter resistance from the bureaucracy, and the Soviet public- resentful, lacking the discipline of democratic practice, and harboring so many ancient and rival nationalisms-is only too likely to run beyond the restraints of prudence...

...But while Brzezinski's case is compelling, it is dangerously monocular, like Romans exulting in the decline of Parthia and neglecting their own decay...

...One may hope otherwise: the Soviet "democratization from below" was altogether remarkable in the recent election, and a lesson to Americans on die value and possibilities of citizenship...

...The subordination of democracy to revolution was the first principle of Soviet politics...

...Soviet apologetics to the contrary, Brzezinski is right in arguing that Lenin laid the foundations for Stalin's less graceful totalitarianism, resting on the pillars of ideology and terror...

...Soviet repressiveness has, from the beginning, been a relatively open secret...

...Similarly, Communist internationalism must accommodate itself to national cultures and priorities...

...Changes within the Soviet empire remind us that myths matter...

...In the non-Western world, Brzezinski sees the appeal of communism as largely confined to Latin America (where Brzezinski has special worries about Mexico), and even there, it is weakened and discredited by the failure of Leninist regimes...

...Wilson Carey Me Williams ommunism's rise and failure, in Zbigniew Brzezinski's telling, is a "historical tragedy," the story of high aspiration brought low, its hope for liberating justice become first cruelty, then deadening routine, and now caught in an "irreversible historical decline...

...Brzezinski concedes that in China, a stronger tradition of entrepre-neurship may make it possible to combine economic reform with political repression...

...Moreover, I think that Brzezinski underrates the impact on external opinion of the limited democratization underway in Poland...

...At best, Brzezinski expects a few years of reform, followed by a return to bureaucratic stagnation, and he is betting with the odds...

...Since then the Soviet Union has fallen into very evident economic stagnation and, worse, it is losing ground to the West, and even more to Japan...

...It was Lenin who envisioned the state in which bureaucratic rationality would be fired by mass enthusiasm organized and directed by the vanguard party, a new regime which demanded the "withering away of society...

...w imperishable...

...willy-nilly, Gorbachev is not pointing to reform, but to a kind of counterrevolution...

...If Gorbachev falters, old-style totalitarianism will find new defenders...

...Marxism, with its emphasis on objective forces and material conditions, is displacing Leninist activism: twice, Brzezinski quotes Hu Quili's saying, "whatever benefits the development of p:<<ductive forces is required or permitted by socialism...

...f.S...

...A market economy, however, does not presuppose political democracy...

...Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers ought to be read alongside Brzez-inski's book, as a reminder that the economic problems of the Soviet Union have their counterparts in the United States...

...Clearly, there is a difference: the recent Soviet elections would never have been possible under Nazism...

...In Europe, this is now apparent...

...Nevertheless, the popular desire for more consumer goods sits badly with the need for more saving and productivity...

...In Europe and America, audiences-middle-class people, enjoying the West's liberties and comforts-are crowding to see Les Miserables, enchanted by its message that revolutionary hope, so often naive and terrible, is also somehow imperishable...

...Until the 1970s, however, it was at least possible to argue that Soviet harshness was justified by "historical necessity," since the Soviet Union was gaining on the U.S...

...In Brzezinski's view, while the Soviet Union probably cannot go back to the old order, it almost certainly will be unable to move toward political democratization...

...So far, Gorbachev has been able-or, as Brzezinski suggests, compelled-to argue that economic reform requires a new politics...

...Somewhere, Plekhanov, Lenin's old antagonist, may be enjoying a last laugh...

...Throughout the Soviet empire, the omelet no longer excuses the cracked eggs, and new discontents have been added to old disillusionments...

...In the Soviet Union, there are those who murmur that the onset of economic decline was associated with the lessening of state terror: the quest for "socialist legality," initiated under Khrushchev, by offering modest security to the bureaucracy, provided a new basis for complacency...

...that dilemma, so far insoluble in America, may prove the nemesis of democratization in the USSR...

...Already, the contemporary reforms have shattered the argument that there is no difference between totalitarian ideologies, that Soviet Marxism is the moral equivalent of fascism...

...Where it holds power, Brzezinski contends, communism will survive only to the extent that Communists, no longer guided by ideology, are willing to acknowledge that doctrine must follow and not rule events...

...Whatever the outcome, Brzezinski argues, Communist ideology has become "irrelevant," losing its hold on revolutionary hope...

...And political moods are pendular...

...Eliot, it would seem, is besting Lenin: the final conflict is shrinking from a bang to a whimper...

...Marxist teaching is wrong, in my judgment, but even with its Soviet distortions, it entails a modest democratic impulse, as Brzezinski observes when he speaks of the collision between the "official myth of social egalitarianism" and the practice of "socialism for one class...