Russian Casket, Polish Wake : THE GRAND FAILURE Communism’s Terminal Crisis <i> by Zbigniew Brzezinski (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $19.95; 256 pp.; 0-684-19034-6) </i>

Forty years ago we had a wave of books, with titles such as “The God That Failed,” exposing the totalitarian nature of Soviet Marxism. This book is the first of a new wave laying bare the failure not just of the Marxist-Leninist faith but of the communist system. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in an almost triumphalist vein about the failings of communism. And understandably so, for the admissions of past failure, the turn toward a mixed economy now evident in Moscow, must be gratifying to someone who has pursued a hard critical line on communism as a leading scholar over the last 30 years and as national security adviser under President Carter.

Brzezinski clearly relishes the task of dissecting the breakup of a doctrine and system he has long argued was fatally flawed by “grand oversimplification” of societal problems, utopian social engineering goals, and the contradiction between the Communist Party’s power monopoly and the economic need for pluralism and initiative. He sees the decay of Communist states now taking place as the inevitable result of a diseased organism riddled by a cancerous doctrine that doomed the experiment of communism to becoming the “twentieth century’s most extraordinary political and intellectual aberration.”

Brzezinski conducts his analysis of communism like a diagnosis of a dying body, at times like a post-mortem. His enthusiasm, intellectual power, remarkable range of knowledge and clarity of style make this an important and also very readable book. The well-structured argument and bold statements unclouded by qualification will please the wider audience and stimulate, if sometimes irritate, the specialist. Brzezinski favors a broad brush approach and is happy, in a book meant for the informed public, to concentrate on generalizations and conclusions rather than detailed and substantial argument. Thus his chronicle of “humanity’s catastrophic encounter with communism” takes us rapidly and selectively from Leninism, dynamic and stagnant Stalinism and perestroika through Polish society’s “self-emancipation” and China’s efforts to modernize after Mao and on to the bankruptcy of Third World Marxist hopes and the collapse of the world communist movement.

Brzezinski is at his best and most balanced on the Chinese attempt to create a “commercial communism,” an experiment with which he clearly sympathizes. On Poland, he is, as one would expect, very perceptive, though the attention devoted to this East European country tends to crowd out consideration of changes in others. In dealing with the “organic rejection” of communism in the region, the author offers us a mixed bag of snippets of information about economic and political problems and overlong examples of mass ignorance of Marxism. He fails to adequately analyze developments in Hungary, where economic and political reform has evolved most interestingly and furthest toward a limited pluralism.

This unevenness in coverage and analysis is greatest in the key parts of the book, those on the “grand failure” of Stalinism and the current state of “Soviet disunion.” The chapter on the Stalin period gives a succinct summary and assessment of those catastrophic years, now at long last being discussed in the Soviet Union in terms close to the critical Western analyses traditionally branded as bourgeois propaganda.

When Brzezinski turns to the Brezhnev years and Gorbachev’s perestroika, his touch is less sure and the analysis less convincing. Treating the 1970s and 1980s as “stagnant Stalinism” captures only part of the reality of a decaying economic and political system. Thinking in terms of Stalinism and totalitarianism blinkers the author to two sets of developments without which it is difficult to explain perestroika. One is the maturing of Soviet society, the creation of a relatively well-educated population with a large middle class, the first in Russian and Soviet history. It is this group’s critical reaction to the absurdities and performance failures of the Soviet system that lies behind the present attempt to bring the country into the late 20th Century. It was the urgent need for radical change felt by many in the power elite of the educated class, the apparatchiki (Communist Party and state officials), that proved decisive in bringing about the present “revolution.” This is the other vital factor that Brzezinski largely ignores. He finds this apparatchik change of heart “remarkable” since he conceives of it as a partial “conversion” of some of the leaders to “revisionism.” He continues to think in over-ideological terms, seeing change merely as a tactical adjustment to preserve power.

Conceived as a desperate tactical retreat, perestroika is consigned by Brzezinski to “debilitating decay.” To be sure, the author makes out a convincing case for a pessimistic--or in his view an optimistic--scenario. Seemingly intractable economic difficulties and growing fragmentation of the internal empire along ethnic lines do augur ill for any stable development of reform.

But are they necessarily “insurmountable obstacles”? Much depends on the mechanisms that Gorbachev can create to deal with the more “normal” and difficult Realpolitik which glasnost and perestroika have encouraged. The chapter on current changes hardly touches on legal and institutional / political reforms. Difficult as these are to marry with a tradition and political culture of one-party rule, one should not exclude the possibility of an uneven long-haul evolution toward not liberal democracy but authoritarian government allowing for some genuine economic and political pluralism.

Where tradition and political culture are less inimical, as in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the future seems brighter than the “protracted but inconclusive turmoil” to which Brzezinski seems to consign all Communist-led attempts at fundamental reform. There are many more shades of gray in the uneven, crisis-ridden evolution from traditional communist rule we are now seeing than Brzezinski’s black-and-white, over-ideological analysis allows.

We should be neither so certain of the demise of all forms of communism nor, in view of resurgent nationalism, be as sure as is Brzezinski that democracy will dominate the 21st Century.