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In order to believe the Soviet Union is capable of waging and quite possibly winning a war against the West, one has to accept as gospel a hoary and dubious cliche about the U.S.S.R.: the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works, with the prominent and crucial exception of two institutions -- the armed forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that cannot put food on its people's tables can put an SS-18 warhead on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota, some 5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to 20% of the grain harvested on the collective farms rots or falls off the back of trucks before it reaches the cities, a Soviet-led blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a masterpiece of military efficiency.
The big red military machine may still look formidable from 22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But at ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their backward, non- Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back of clunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees, from the East European states. They include some of the same Hungarians who chanted, "Russians Go Home!"; the same Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into Wenceslas Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking their key chains; and the same East Germans who found a better way to invade the Federal Republic throughout the year.
In addition to counting heads with helmets on them and inventorying the enemy's hardware, the American arithmetic of fear has always factored in an ideological multiplier. Here was a political system that, seen from the outside, seemed to have a flat belly, a thick neck, big biceps and plenty of intestinal fortitude; it was also thought to have, in communism, a coherent and all too plausible plan for winning the zero-sum game of history.
In the 1970s some respected intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe worked themselves into paroxysms of Spenglerian pessimism about the decline of the West. As recently as 1983, Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies Perish. It began: "Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little over two centuries, to judge by the speed of growth of the forces bent on its destruction." Principal among those superior hostile forces was world communism.
Yet an important part of the drama of this past year was the implosion of the very idea of communism. Many card-carrying party intellectuals in Moscow, particularly of the younger generation, admit that perestroika too is a euphemism; it suggests fixing something that is broken, but it really means scrapping something that never worked, even as a blueprint for Soviet society, not to mention for world conquest.