THE RADIANT FUTURE.

Soviet placards and paintings, newspapers and novels, film and music, radio and television portrayed communism as the ‘radiant future of all humanity.’ Every Soviet child was fed a diet of dialectical materialism and taught that history was on the side of communism while capitalism was doomed. Soviet war heroics, scientific achievements and economic progress were all hailed as part of a great march forward to a resplendent tomorrow — one that justified great sacrifices from workers and peasants. But ‘communism’ has fallen on bad days. It has come begging for aid from the West as panic and chaos threaten to dissolve the Soviet Union, Market reform is touted as the universal panacea as the country plunges into economic disaster. Every day the Soviet Union moves closer toward dictatorship and civil war. Communism has ended up in a shambles. In Eastern Europe this seemingly invincible order collapsed within the space of a year. Moreover, with the notable exception of Rumania, these collapses occurred with hardly a whimper. What was to be the radiant future became the radiant past. In a remarkable ideological about turn, now it is capitalism that is proclaimed the radiant future of all mankind. How did these Communist or what we have called state socialist societies crumble? will the putative capitalist future be any more radiant than the socialist part? Will the gap between ideology and reality remain as wide as it was under the old regime? And, if so, with what effects? What is the real future of what was state socialism? These are the questions we try to answer in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]