Requiem for a Heavyweight: the Fall of the Soviet Union : Will the next chapter be filled with harshness and ethnic strife?

Mikhail S. Gorbachev resigned Wednesday night as the Soviet Union’s last and only laudable leader, and minutes later the red flag of revolution that for nearly three-quarters of a century symbolized the Soviet state was lowered for the final time from the towers of the Kremlin.

The next day those few dozen members of the Soviet Parliament who cared enough to show up voted to dissolve their congress and the state. On Jan. 2 the last remaining institutions of that state are scheduled to expire.

Strangely, these inherently dramatic events seem to have evoked little reaction among those to whom they matter most.

The formal liquidation of a vast empire is instead occurring almost as an anticlimax, an afterthought that merely places history’s signature on a death certificate filled in some time ago.

For Soviet citizens the state’s end has come virtually unmourned, save perhaps by those of the now defunct Communist Party’s elite who drew power and privilege from governing in its name. For the mass of former Soviet citizens the end of the old order seems to have been met largely with indifference tempered by anxiety.

Facing a future certain to be harsh, with ethnic strife simmering between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with civil war bubbling in Georgia and with the seeds of a hundred other nationalistic conflicts sown, they are little inclined right now to ponder, let alone pine for the past.

That past is a remarkable and horrifying story, many of whose most significant details remain to be discovered in the enormous Soviet archives.

All totalitarian regimes try to hide their real nature from the world. The Soviet regime tried harder than most, and was able to count on a large number of foreign well-wishers and apologists to help it along.

There was no mystery about the reasons for this support, at least in the beginning. Marxism’s notion that scientific methods can produce a system of economic cooperation that will eliminate poverty, crime and injustice has a powerful idealistic appeal.

The American journalist Lincoln Steffens, who exulted after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1919 that “I have been over into the future, and it works,” was expressing a faith that many in the West were to echo.

What worked, though, worked largely through compulsion and brutality, beginning with the Red Terror launched by Vladimir Lenin in 1918 to sustain the putsch by which his Bolsheviks had seized power a year earlier.

Lenin’s belief that any means could be used to further the goals of the revolution set the stage for the immeasurable cruelties and mass killings of the Stalin years: for the total disregard of the human costs that accompanied industrialization and forced collectivization, for an imperial expansion that was to rob millions in Eastern Europe of their independence.

By the early 1980s the myth of Soviet success, long supported abroad by highly visible but crippling investments in a huge military machine and at home by lies no one any longer believed, had become unsustainable.

Gorbachev, emerging from the ruling elite but shunning their typical and cynical stand-pattism, knew intuitively that only radical reforms could save a country whose cumulative economic and social failures were leading to its slow suicide.

But in fostering those policies, in refusing to intervene in Eastern Europe’s anti-communist revolutions, in declaring the national economy a disaster, in giving Soviet citizens an opportunity for freedom, Gorbachev unintentionally sowed the seeds of his own destruction.

Though the final word on Gorbachev has yet to be written, history’s judgment on the Soviet Union has long since been passed, and it’s unlikely that the future will see any need to lessen its harshness.

“The chief shortcoming of the reign of Nicholas Alexandrovich was that it was all a mistake,” a contemporary said of Czar Nicholas I in the middle of the last century. That epitaph could stand as well for the late Soviet Union.