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EDITOR'S NOTE - Robert Reid, an AP foreign correspondent who has worked in eastern Europe and the Balkans, covered Pope John Paul (news - web sites) II's historic visit to Poland in 1979 and takes it as a starting point for reflecting on the rise and fall of communism.
- The wheels of history turned on a sweltering June day in 1979 before thousands of people standing in a field in Poland to hear Pope John Paul II say Mass in his communist homeland.
The words of this first pope to visit a communist country rang out through a Europe divided by hostile military blocs and rival social systems:
``Is it not Christ's will that this Polish pope, this Slav pope, should - at this precise moment - manifest the spiritual unity of Christian Europe?''
Poland's communist government seemed to pay little attention. After all, it was Josef Stalin, the Soviet communist dictator, who had once asked mockingly: ``How many divisions does the pope have?''
Twelve years after that open-air Mass in Gniezno, western Poland, the Soviet empire was collapsing. A system that once ruled nearly half of humanity had suffered a mortal blow. Where communism survives - in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea (news - web sites) and Cuba - it is being eroded by capitalism and globalization.
Fast foward to the new millennium and to Bucharest, Romania. Its massive Stalinist apartment buildings remain as a mute testimony to the communist era of gray uniformity. But smiling down from the side of one building is J.R. Ewing, the evil oilman of TV's ``Dallas,'' and he's advertising a Russian gas company.
Ten years have passed - and the whole world has changed - since Aug. 19, 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank to face down a comunist coup and bring on the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics less than five months later.
The 1990s saw Nelson Mandela go from a prison cell to the presidency of South Africa. Germany was reunited and communist China set up stock exchanges. Yitzhak Rabin (news - web sites) shook hands with Yasser Arafat (news - web sites). All these events were unimaginable during the decades when the two rival superpowers tied the fate of the whole world into their giant global chess game.
True, the world is hardly a safe place now, and human history did not grind to a halt when the Soviet Union collapsed. Ethnic conflict in the Balkans and the Caucasus, wars in Africa, a divided Korea, China's claim on Taiwan and the spread of militant Islamic fundamentalism all threaten global peace.
However, the specter of humanity incinerated in a massive nuclear exchange now seems a distant memory.
It all seemed very different not so long ago. ``History is on our side,'' Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev boasted to Western diplomats in 1956. ``We will bury you.''
At the time, Moscow was on a roll. It was the West that was struggling to hold the line against what the communists insisted was the tide of history.
Communism spread from China to Africa to the heart of central Europe - and even to America's own doorstep in Cuba.
Communist insurgencies raged from Greece to Malaysia to Central America. Robust communist parties competed for votes in Italy and France. U.S. troops fought communist armies to a stalemate in South Korea (news - web sites) and suffered their first military defeat in Vietnam.
Despite its flaws, the Soviet Union served as a beacon for peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America seeking to shake off the vestiges of colonialism. A generation of their best and brightest studied at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow or read Marx and Mao by candlelight in jungle hideouts.
The Soviets beat the United States into space, starting with Sputnik in 1957. The West talked of ``containment,'' then of ``detente.'' At best the Soviet empire might be stopped from spreading. Rolling it back was unthinkable.
For Karl Marx, the 19th century father of communism, history was an inexorable march from feudalism, to monarchy, to capitalism and ultimately to a system where workers would control the means of production and resources would be distributed ``to each according to his needs.''
Those ideals electrified intellectuals in Britain, Germany, France - even America.
Lincoln Steffens, the American writer, visited the Soviet Union in 1919, two years after Lenin's communists seized power, and declared: ``I have seen the future and it works.''
But as Soviet power reached its height, the contradictions in the system were becoming clear. If communism was inevitable, why did communist governments need to use violence to stay in power - in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968? Why did dissidents have to be jailed or exiled?
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev built up the Soviet military machine at the expense of industries capable of raising living standards. The planned economy proved inflexible. Soviet mathematicians could design the world's best computer chips, but there were no factories to make them. They weren't in the plan.
Cynicism replaced Marxism as ideology. Communism's ``greatest generation'' defeated Hitler; its children joined the Communist Party to get cushy jobs and trips to the West.
With the economy unable to supply basic goods, the entire system relied on connections. A relative in the party could provide scarce meat, which in turn could be traded for milk or imported clothing. Housewives would trade secrets, such as which store had bananas that day.
The failure of their own economies encouraged communist leaders to open up trade with the West. With that came Western influence and ideas - not always positive ones.
Western businessmen visiting Warsaw, Prague and Moscow would encounter young schoolteachers from remote cities working as prostitutes during their vacations. They could earn more in a week than their state jobs paid in a year.
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu allowed state television to broadcast ``Dallas,'' believing that J.R.'s sleazy ways would expose the West's moral bankruptcy. Instead, the tycoon became a role model for young capitalist-minded Romanians.
Historians will long debate how much the pope's visit to Poland influenced the unraveling of the communist bloc, but a year after his visit, Lech Walesa and his fellow shipyard workers went on strike to demand an end to censorship, the right to organize their own unions and the freedom to travel abroad.
The government granted those demands, and although it rolled back in December 1981 and imposed martial law, it could not suppress those ideals. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was being led by a reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev, who hoped to reshape communism into a more, humane, open system.
But Gorbachev could not move fast enough to keep pace with the pressure for change. First Poland and the Soviet Union's other East European satellites, and then the Soviet republics themselves, began to break away.
In 1991, in a last effort to reverse history, communist die-hards in Moscow mounted their coup. Their failure proved to be Soviet communism's last gasp.
An era died, too. Nuclear holocaust is out; global warming is in. Class struggle to human genome; glasnost to globalization. Dennis Tito, a self-made American capitalist, pays his own way for a ride in space - aboard a Russian rocket.
Democracy has spread - in one form or another - to about two-thirds of the globe, albeit imperfectly in many places. Old communists in Bulgaria and Romania are clamoring to join NATO (news - web sites). Twenty-two years ago, Moscow's friend, Daniel Ortega, ousted a U.S.-backed regime in Nicaragua. He's back, running again for president, still railing against U.S. economic domination but this time displaying the Stars and Stripes at rallies.
The young are still marching, not against American missiles but to protest multinational corporations and globalization. And they organize over the Internet - just one more symbol of the unified world few could have imagined in that Polish field not so long ago.
The USSR did not "fall". The Soviet empire did not end. It morphed.
The Cold War is not over. The Russians are not our friends.
Funny how the insolvent Russians can manage to keep developing and fielding new generations of offensive missiles. For what use are they intended?...
And that underground city the size of Washington, D.C., that they are building--and have never stopped working on--and will not discuss...for what use is it intended?
And their gigantic chemical-biological weapons infrastructure, employing tens or hundreds of thousands, has never been dismantled, never been shut down. Interesting that they seem to be able to keep up the work on such a "useless" technology, when they are friends with everyone.
--Boris
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