Men inside the Kremlin and other centers of Communist power...understood that their hold on the reins of power was tenuous and contingent.

This can't be stated enough.

I don't know if Brown's book ever mentions this but a curious things came up when the former USSR started declassifying all of the old materials from its space program. It turns out that the Soviet military had secretly designed an armed variant of the Solyut which carried an axially-mounted heavy machine gun capable of operating in vacuum.

The Americans who first learned about this were baffled. The Solyut was a simple space capsule, entirely incapable of chasing around in orbit after us. They had to know, what had the Russian rocket scientists possibly have been thinking?

Their reply was that pursuit had never been the idea — ingrained into the whole of the Soviet military command was the belief that it was the Americans who would be doing the attacking, and they were simply planning accordingly.

I grew up during the late cold war. The idea that these big, scary Soviets that so terrified us had actually all along been desperately trying to find ways to defend themselves from us — and that one could touch and see the artifacts of that fear — left a huge impression on me.

For 75 years we convinced ourselves that the Reds were coming at any moment, and no sacrifice — of wealth, life, and liberty — was too great in the face of that existential threat. Yet the Reds of our imagination were far more powerful than the ones that actually faced us. By allowing ourselves to be hypnotized by that fantasy, we Americans escaped having to come to terms with the way the world really worked, and who really had cause to be afraid of whom.

Today, whenever I hear about the looming dangers of Islamism or al Qaeda or terrorist or burqas or what have you, I think about that silly space capsule with the machine gun. That's your looming terror, right there.

and saw Communism first hand for 3 weeks. I will never forget landing at the airport in Moscow and walking across the tarmac. It was my first trip overseas.

We were one of a couple of high schools in New York where the students had the opportunity to study Russian and I studied the culture and the language for 6 years. We had exchange teachers and the "whole works".

One of the chaparones on the trip was a Dr. T. who was an ecologist that specialized in siting dams. In his postion he had done much traveling. When we entered the hotel Moskva we had to cross over some welding torch lines in one of the best hotels in the Soviet Union. We could see the welder at work in the hotel lobby with us. I could hear Dr. T. mumble under his breath "and these guys are supposed to take over the world?"

As we toured the Soviet Union we could see that the wounds of WWII were still raw. Old men couldn't be found but old women were everywhere. The memorial in Leningrad was chilling to visit, I will never forget what those mass graves looked like. The scale of death was just massive ... it was everywhere. The mounds of anonymous dead people were just hugs.

It will be interesting to see if this book addresses the role of our right wing during this time. The current American state is filled with National Socialist leanings on a level that would make Hitler marvel. It would be cool to find someone who could actually define National Socialism as an economic system. When Hitler started WWII I think Germany had some giant corporations, many of them military. And if they were to try and seperate their interests from the government's I suspect you would be hard pressed to see the difference. I bet TARP in Hitler's Germany would be a no brainer much like Bush and now Obama. And the current American military-industrial complex is probably modeled after Hitler's. After all we did steal their scientists and use their (Germany's) technology to put man on the moon.

The Soviet Union provided the convenient foil to make all this possible. Now it is terrorism.

Yes indeed. In a way Hitler did win, it's just that Germany lost. While his extreme anti-Jewish philosophy has been rightly defeated, he has provided the world with important devices still used in creating and organizing the modern nation state. Too bad.

would inevitably lead to shortages and open the door to acquisition through patron-client relations. This is why the leadership in the Central Asian Republics survived the collapse of communism, especially evident in "the stans." They were always under local leadership which reported to Moscow, not Russian cadres sent to the hinterland to civilize the heathens. And those local leaders had developed immense patronage networks by the time the USSR was dismantled that made the transition to capitalism and independence more or less intact.

It's a mistake to ask what the appeal was of Communism in terms of why people would choose it over capitalism. Almost without exception, Communist states emerged directly out of post-feudal, semi-industrialized economies, not out of mature free-market capitalist democracies. The people who were choosing (or "choosing") Communism weren't choosing it over capitalism — they were choosing it over something else, and understanding what that something else was helps answer the question.

What fully industrialized societies did instead was adopt various forms of democratic socialism, or (in the US) the peculiar system that we now call consumer capitalism. (Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci got himself into trouble with the Party for observing that what Henry Ford had brought about with his affordable mass-produced consumer goods was nothing less than the death of communism.)

The only exceptions I can think of are Czechoslovakia and East Germany, both of which were Communist by fiat after the Soviet post-war occupation, rather than by virtue of anything any reasonable person would describe as "choice."

The thing is, many people who lived under Communism really did seem to sincerely feel that they'd dodged a bullet, by avoiding the ills of industrial capitalism. One still hears this sentiment sometimes from Cubans — "we may not be super excited about the system we've got," they say, "but at least we haven't fucked everything up as bad as you have."

When you consider the Batistas or Romanovs or colonialist interlopers who preceded them, it's hard not to think that maybe they had a point.