Learning from Communism's Fall
A SL~IJ~J
of Recent Articles
From its birth in 1917 until its death last summer, Soviet communism had a pro-found impact on Western political thought and behavior. The Soviet Union was not just another nation, but history's first fully "socialist" society. The Russian Revolu- tion, Martin Malia, a professor of Russian history at Berkeley, notes in Commentary (Oct. 1991), became "the great polarizing event in 20th-century politics," turning the division between Left and R...