Soviet Communism (1917-1991 )
CONQUEST, ROBERT
THE REVOLUTION THAT FAILED SOVIET COMMUNISM (1917-1991) BY ROBERT CONQUEST Soviet Communism was pronounced dead on September 5, 1991. Born on November 7, 1917, its parentage was obscure....
...By the early 1970s it was unquestionably wasting away...
...There are many descriptions of its early years...
...At least it briefly managed once again to impress a variety of experts that this was truly the reality...
...Although initially this took a less manic and more gloomy form, a violent attack of anti-Semitic obsession ensued...
...In the ensuing confrontation, it appeared that Soviet Communism was enjoying better mental health...
...Funeral Friday, at the Smolny, St...
...In August 1991 it rallied enough to go into a final tantrum, then expired miserably...
...In some of them it is seen as a beautiful baby, admired by all, except for a few curmudgeons...
...But she rejected the claim, and in fact the child seems to have been a changeling...
...Marx identified the line's original progenitor on the male side as a rather clumsy and unpleasing character called English Economics...
...Indeed, it was no w in a stage of such advanced paranoia that it began itself to believe that it was healthy and flourishing...
...More recent biographers have demonstrated that it suffered from destructive tantrums even in infancy, though calming down for a while from the age of four, under a temporarily effective treatment called NEP...
...Its reputed grandfather, Karl Marx, told of its descent from German Philosophy—often represented in neoclassical sculpture as a magnificent figure of a woman, yet thought by most observers not to match Clio in either beauty or intelligence...
...However, in the mid-'60s, it sank into a long period of ever-increasing apathy and senility...
...Its father, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, maintained that its mother was Clio, History in person...
...For a time their friendship seemed to make its condition worse, in a sort of folieàdeux...
...But by 1990 the case was obviously hopeless...
...But, as is usual with such characters, they soon fell out...
...As it reached adulthood, it increasingly succeeded in concealing these from the world...
...Attempts to restore its health by a variety of new techniques of shock treatment led to occasional hopeful signs...
...In view of the deceased's antipathy to hymns, the following will be sung (to the air of "Bye Bye Love"): Bye bye Karl, Bye bye Vladimir, USSR disappear To the land above the skv...
...Nevertheless, it is clear that by the age of 30, in the late 1940s, the paranoia was intractable...
...Whatever the case, Soviet Communism, in infancy, maturity and old age, was chiefly known as an example of various psychological and physical disorders...
...By 1939 the neighborhood had deteriorated, and the subject of this obituary formed an association with a fellow psychopath—actually a distant cousin—named Nazism...
...The effects of this new economic policy wore off by 1929, and for several years it suffered from convulsions of a particularly unattractive sort...
...In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it developed some signs of insight into its unfortunate condition, and a full recovery seemed possible...
...Petersburg...
...It came into a large agricultural and industrial heritage, which, over the decades, it frittered away in crackpot schemes, leading eventually to bankruptcy...
Vol. 74 • September 1991 • No. 10
