Commentary
Those who know the value of freedom most keenly are those who have lived under totalitarianism. When the Eastern Bloc nations were finally liberated, more than three decades ago now, it was no surprise that they sought capitalism like a man lost in the desert yearning for water. But what did astound many was the undiluted form of the free market policies they embraced.
Largely forgotten today is how faithfully Western European and American elites in politics, academe, and the media downplayed the threat posed and the persecution practiced by the Soviet empire. As CBS News Moscow correspondent Jonathan Sanders noted in a review of S.J. Taylor’s 1990 book Walter Duranty—The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, there were no true experts on Communist Russia, proven by “the abject failure of Kremlin watchers to foresee the emergence of Gorbachev as the Communist Party’s leader. But far more damning was the arrogance of constancy—the assumption that the social and political order was basically immutable. Many Kremlinologists missed the welling sentiment for radical reforms among the Gorbachev generation. Prominent observers of the Soviet scene even denied that the impulse for radical change existed.”…