The phantasmagoria in the U.S.S.R. has overloaded the circuits. For days on end, there was little room on the front pages for other news, and barely room in our minds for other astonishments and anxieties.
Yet the Big Story is even bigger than it seems. The old order failed in the Soviet Union, and in Eastern Europe two years ago, for reasons that apply everywhere Marxism-Leninism still holds sway. What that system does best is protect the power and privileges of its elite. The means to that end are terror and bureaucracy. The result is chronic inefficiency, an unhappy, unproductive citizenry,...
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