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It is beyond dispute that the Gramschian strategy of the Comintern ends up our daily reality of the West, through government takeover of poverty relief, education and healthcare, marginalization of religion and left wing march through the institutions that still remain ostensibly free.

The question is, do we deduce from that that the Comintern (or maybe the old KGB) is still in charge, or simply that the Comintern accurately predicted the unfortunate logic of history and interpreted it in a self-serving way?

I think the latter, for these reasons:

- The blows to the soviet system were very real. The USSR lost most its constituents republics, lost the status of world power, is militarily surronded by NATO, its brutality has been revealed, the failure of centrally planned economy evident to all. The soviet style of communism has no crown jewels left. Yet the doctrine that lead to this demise was unyielding Brezhnev doctrine of once Soviet, forever Soviet.

- The leftwing successes in the West could be explained without resorting to a Comintern plot. They are, in fact, attributable to something the Comintern was hostile toward, — they are attributable to democracy. Let us not forget that the idea to take from the 20% who are rich and give it to the 80% who are poor does not require plotters in the Kremlin, it is the idea that wins every time democratically.

- As we watched the events of 1980-90s unfold, we observed indeed a stage where the liberalization came according to the playbook, from the top. The failure of planned economy was evident to the Soviet rulers in the 70’s if not sooner; one could see repeated attempts to reshuffle the system all along: revitalize farmer interest in agriculture, build something grandiose (Obama did not invent “stimulus”) with student labor, steal technology from the West, swap arm control deals for commodity goods. In the early 80’s with the unsuccessful invasion of Afghanistan, it became clear that the crisis is irreversible. That a leader like Gorbachev would emerge was simply the matter of the old dinosaurs in Suslov/Chernenko mold to die out. It was no plot, just logic of history and economy. But in late 80’s it became also clear that graduated liberalization was not working. The “near abroad” erupted in massive civil unrest and in some cases wars. The Nagorny Karabakh war was the first, I think. This is when Gorbachev was ousted by a hardline communist coup and then the coup leaders were themselves ousted by the Russian Army turning, quite heroically, on their political leaders, and the Soviet Union was no more.

The zigs and zags of this story, especially the populist element that carried Yeltsyn to victory, make an idea of a secretly managed transition quite a bit absurd.