Defending and Advancing Freedom

What Is to Be Done?

Contemporary Russia is a country led by a cadre out to make trouble.

George Kennan by John Lukacs

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis

Defending and Advancing Freedom

To commemorate COMMENTARY's 60th anniversary, and in an effort to advance discussion of the present American position in the world, the editors asked 36 leading thinkers to comment on the Bush administration's conduct of foreign policy.

A Secret Life by Benjamin Weiser

A Secret Life by Benjamin Weiser reviewed by Richard Pipes

Interesting Times by Eric Hobsbawm

Troublemaker by Kathleen Burk

The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

Yeltsin-and After

In the end, the founder of the new Russia could overcome neither his own failings nor the weight of his country's past.

Life, Liberty, Property

At century's end, freedom is threatened less by tyranny than by equality, and especially by encroachments on the right to own.

The Noblest Triumph by Tom Bethell

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington

Russia's Past, Russia's Future

Russia in the last few years has been a great disappointment to those of us who, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, had expected the country to embark on a slow, probably uneven, but still irreversible course of Westernization.

The National Prospect

To commemorate Commentary's fiftieth anniversary, the editors addressed the following statement and questions to a group of American intellectuals:

What To Do About the CIA

For the second time since it came into being in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency is fighting for its life.

Lenin's Tomb, by David Remnick

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire will occupy historians and political theorists for years to come.

Pandaemonium, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Pandaemonium, in Milton's Paradise Lost, is the capital of hell.

Russia's Chance

When in 1917 the Russian empire exploded in revolution, the writer V.V. Rozanov observed with astonishment that his country had “wilted in two days. At the very most three. . . . It is amazing how she suddenly fell apart, all of her, down to particles, to pieces. . . . And what remained? Strange to say, nothing. A base people remained.”

Gorbachev's Russia: Breakdown or Crackdown?

To say that we live in the midst of a Worldwide political earthquake is to state the obvious.

The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917, by Nora Levin; The Jews of the Soviet Union, by Benjamin Pinkus

The Nazis hated the Jews and murdered them. The Russian Communists, while professing to abhor ethnic prejudice, systematically killed the Jewish national and religious community.

American Jews and Israel A Symposium

Never, perhaps, has criticism of the state of Israel by American Jews been so open, so widespread, and so bitter as it is today. Commentary asked 49 American Jewish intellectuals: Have your attitudes toward Israel changed in recent years? To what extent do you believe Israel has fulfilled, or disappointed, the hopes vested in it? How do you feel about the upsurge of Jewish criticism of Israel?

Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth

To understand the evolution in American strategic thinking regarding nuclear war it is worthwhile recalling the episode of "Team B" which occurred ten years ago as a result of the decision of the then-Director of Central Intelligence, George Bush, to commission alternative assessments of the Soviet strategic threat.

How Has the United States Met Its Major Challenges Since 1945?

Exactly forty years ago, in the first issue of COMMENTARY (November 1945), its found- ing editor, the

How to Cope With the Soviet Threat A Long-Term Strategy for the West

The comments which follow will deal with the preferred Western response to Soviet leadership in the military, political, and economic fields.

Soviet Global Strategy

President Carter addressed himself to the Soviet leadership: Will it help promote a stable international environment in which its own legitimate, peaceful concerns can be pursued? That the President could seriously raise such questions with the record of over six decades of Soviet history at his disposal, suggests that he has yet to find out who they are and what they want.

How the Soviet Union Is Governed, by Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod

WHEN Ibsen brought out A W Doll's House a hundred years ago, its denouement proved too strong for conventional

Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight & Win a Nuclear War

In a recent interview with the New Republic, Paul Warnke, the newly appointed head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, responded as follows to the question of how the United States ought to react to indications that the Soviet leadership thinks it possible to fight and win a nuclear war. "In my view, this kind of thinking is unrealistic." Even after allowance has been made for Mr. Warnke's notoriously careless syntax, puzzling questions remain.