ABSTRACT
It is often said that our scientific approach to history debars us from discriminating between good and evil; but the real trouble is not that this method blinds us to crime but that it renders us incapable of envisaging folly. Volume upon volume of excellent scholarship is rapidly accumulating on the history of the Russian Revolution, but as the author read these books he find his own recollection of this event dissolving bit by bit. The author believes the rulers of the Soviet Union know, better than anyone else, the impossibility of genuine central planning; they know it in their bones, but their lips are sealed. The project of a centrally directed industrial system died in March 1921, and the system of commercial state capitalism was promptly invented to replace it. But the dead ideology of socialism was not buried. Far from it.
