cover image The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century

The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century

Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. Scribner Book Company, $19.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19034-1

Communism is doomed to collapse in the foreseeable future, predicts former National Security Council director Brzezinski in this brisk polemic, an amalgam of wishful thinking and hardnosed analysis. Unlike other Western commentators who see Gorbachev's reforms as opening the door to a more permissive, economically innovative Soviet Union, Brzezinski portrays the Soviet leader as fatally trapped by the need to maintain the Communist Party's monopoly of power, while coping with economic failures, restive nationalist movements and an Eastern European bloc careening out of Moscow's control. Turning to China, the author surmises that Deng's long-term policy of socioeconomic renewal will probably prove successful, but at great cost to the ideological unity of the communist movement. Citing what he sees as socialism's repeated failures in Third World countries, Brzezinski concludes that the communist model of development is rapidly becoming one to be avoided, not imitated. 75,000 first printing; first serial to the New York Times Magazine . (Mar.)