For Brown, a Communist system had three pairs of identifying characteristics, all of which have their origins in Lenin's ideology and philosophy. In the political realm, a monopoly of power was held by one party, with most of the power concentrated at the top, and that party operated through the process Lenin called "democratic centralism." That was supposed to mean that open discussion could precede decision-making, which was then administered with unanimity and iron discipline. It usually meant, of course, that decisions were handed down from a dictator or a small circle of oligarchs, and were neither discussed nor questioned. In the economic realm, the state controlled the means of production, and a command economy, rather than a market economy, predominated. In the ideological realm, the declared aim of building communism -- for Marx, the classless, stateless final stage of human development -- was the state's "ultimate, legitimizing goal," and the state belonged to an international Communist movement aimed at moving the whole world toward that future society.

Communism remained a politically effective force as long as these three pillars worked to support each other. While the command economy was notoriously bad at delivering consumer goods and the one-party state offered little room for civil rights or liberties, they did deliver improved healthcare and education and widespread social mobility, along with rapid industrial progress. As long as at least some people in a society truly believed that they were part of a historic and inevitable shift away from capitalism toward something better, the hardships seemed to be worth it. Brown suggests that many people in Communist societies, including their leaders, did believe that until at least the 1960s.

Yet as people in such societies became healthier and better educated, they began to wonder about the massive social costs that "socialist progress" required in the best of times, not to mention the famine, starvation and murder it occasioned at others. They wondered about the police state the ruling party always seemed to require to maintain order, about the fantastical future that seemed to be getting no closer and about the non-Communist world, where higher living standards and greater political and personal freedom seemed to go hand in hand.

According to Brown, Nikita Khrushchev -- probably the last Soviet leader who believed in the future promise of small-C communism -- used to tell a joke in which a party apparatchik delivers a talk at a collective farm deep in the Russian countryside. "Comrades, some of you may doubt that we will ever live under communism," he intones, "but I tell you it lies just beyond the horizon!" An aged peasant sticks up his hand and says, "Comrade Lecturer, what is the horizon?" The lecturer says, "I am glad you asked that, Venerable Comrade. The horizon is the imaginary line where the land meets the sky, which has the unique property of always moving further away as you approach it." The aged peasant replies, "Thank you, Comrade Lecturer. Now I understand completely."

Brown has read virtually every available scholarly work published about the Communist era in either English or Russian, and has studied the now-declassified Soviet archives extensively. Arguably he offers nothing startling or new on such well-rehearsed topics as the October Revolution, the brilliant and ruthless figures of Lenin and Trotsky, and the Stalinist reign of terror that followed. But his arguments are balanced and clear. One doesn't have to excuse the brutality and bloodshed of Lenin's revolutionary regime, for instance, to grasp that he would have been horrified by Stalin's paranoid and murderous expansion of it.

When Brown turns to the long endgame of the Communist era, from Khrushchev's 1956 revelations about Stalin to the long, slow percolation of dissent under Brezhnev and the sudden explosion of perestroika, his account is frequently mesmerizing and leavened with colorful anecdotes. He offers considerable new insight into what leading figures within the Communist bloc were saying and thinking at such critical junctures as the Cuban missile crisis, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Solidarity uprising in Poland during the early '80s. In all three of those cases, the Soviet leadership tried to walk a fine line invisible to outsiders. They could feel their empire slipping away and sought to preserve it, while also trying to stave off an intra-Kremlin coup by Stalinist hard-liners.

Brown does not believe that Soviet Communism was fated to die because of its economic failures or its autocratic character, nor does he think it was brought down by the arms race or Reagan's muscular rhetoric. If anything, he is a charmingly old-fashioned historian who sees the slow process of social change embodied in individual personalities. He suggests that if either Yuri Andropov or Konstantin Chernenko -- Gorbachev's short-lived predecessors -- had survived a few more years, or if the ruling Politburo had elected any other member as general secretary after Chernenko's death in March 1985, recent history might look very different. Furthermore, if the Politburo members had understood Gorbachev's thinking a little better, they would certainly not have chosen him.

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Gorbachev's life experience and philosophy, Brown argues, gave him a mental flexibility and imagination that were unique among leading Communists. He began as leader with the genuine aim of reforming the one-party state, largely by relaxing censorship and encouraging open dialogue. Some of his fellow Communists were ready for this, but few were prepared for Gorbachev's rapid evolution into a social democrat. By 1989 he had decided that it was too late to save Communist rule, and abruptly announced that the party would abandon its "leading role" in society and hold free elections.

This launched a process Gorbachev could no longer control, which included an explosion of nationalist feeling in Russia and the other Soviet republics and the unexpected emergence of a one-time Moscow Communist boss named Boris Yeltsin. In this exciting, pell-mell experiment in democracy -- Brown says 100 million Soviet citizens watched the early legislative sessions on TV -- Gorbachev hoped to preserve the Soviet state, or most of it, while fundamentally changing its character. After the failed putsch by hard-line Communists late in 1991, that was no longer possible. But Brown is always cautious about hindsight, and says only that the question of whether the Soviet breakup could have been avoided is "unanswered and unanswerable."

Brown is a big believer in the idea that history is not carved in stone. If Czechoslovakia had been allowed to become a social-democratic state in 1968, as both its citizens and its Communist leaders wanted, the Cold War might have ended 20 years earlier than it did. On the other hand, if Gorbachev had been ousted by the Politburo in early 1989 and Soviet tanks sent into Poland (as urged by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu) then the Communist states might not have toppled one after another. As Brown explains it, the now-legendary opening of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, was an accident rather than a policy decision, the result of a careless remark made to Tom Brokaw by a spokesman for the East German Politburo.

One thing was not a historical fluke or accident, though: the fact that a political system based on some half-baked utopian musing by Marx and Engels, and their bogus claims of scientific certainty, was not going to work out well for anybody. There's room for argument about whether it had to turn out quite as badly as it did, and plenty of room for discussing the continuing validity of Marx's insights into capitalism. But there's no denying that the works of a philosopher who championed human creativity became the basis for a social system devoted to crushing it. It's the platonic ideal of historical irony, to which other historical ironies can only aspire, and suggests some very dark possibilities about human nature.

In much of the world, the term "socialism" has been poisoned by its association with Soviet-style Communism; in the United States, it is virtually a term of hate speech. But as Brown (who is certainly no socialist) makes clear, it was socialists who saw the dangers of Communism first and most clearly. In 1918, at the dawn of the Soviet era, Karl Kautsky, who had personally known Marx and Engels in his youth, wrote a diatribe against Lenin's use of the vague Marxist term "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Kautsky insisted it had been meant metaphorically, and that genuine class struggle presupposed genuine democracy. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat "always leads to the dictatorship of a single man, or of a small knot of leaders" and to a situation where ordinary people "only become instruments for carrying out orders."

Although Lenin was trying to defend the Soviet Union against very real enemies within and without, he took time out to bang out an angry broadside against "the despicable renegade Kautsky," which suggests how much the criticism stung. (With characteristic directness, he described his newborn state as "a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie.") Lenin was too intelligent not to understand that there were real dangers in conflating the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of those who claimed to know what was best for the proletariat, but he had long since convinced himself that the imaginary ends justified the brutal means. Seventy years later, the last leader of Lenin's party and Lenin's state would decide that Kautsky had been right all along. 

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