Commentary Once in Moscow, before the downfall of the Soviet Union, I stood in the line to file past the alleged corpse of Lenin in his mausoleum in Red Square. Behind me was a man from Brooklyn. “This country is the hope of the world,” he said. He was an old-fashioned communist of a type that had by then become rather rare but was once very common. The defects of communism, to say nothing of the mass crimes committed in its name, were so undeniable that only the blindest of the blind, such as the man from Brooklyn, could adhere to their former illusions. In fact, the Iron Curtain had for some years served a useful function in the West. The horrors of life behind it were so well documented that they exerted a dampening effect on the fantasies of those who might otherwise have been inclined to utopian dreams. …