ABSTRACT
By the last decade of the twentieth century, it was clear that humankind was witnessing the terminal agony of Marxism as an economic and political system. 1 What enthusiasts had once identified as a “new civilization” revealed itself to be nothing more than a parenthesis in the long history of humanity. 2 At one point in time, regimes inspired by the nineteenth-century creed of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dominated vast territories and about one-third of the world’s population. Marxism’s expansion appeared both irresistible and irreversible. In reality, by the late 1950s, the first signs of systemic decay in the Soviet regime were already discernible. By 1985 domestic critics of Soviet life were prepared to denounce the Marxist-Leninist state as a betrayal of the ideals of the Russian Revolution. Soviet socialism had failed to provide a just, efficient, and functional economy. 3 In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev announced to a startled international audience that except for measurable increases in vodka sales, the Soviet national income had not grown for more than a decade. There was surprise because Western analysts had generally exaggerated Soviet economic growth and development for over half a century.
