All over? Not quite.

BEFORE ME as I write is the issue of NR dated March 16, 1973. It shows COLD WAR in graphic blocks of ice, melting. The title: "The End of the Cold War?" The author? No prizes.

Five-plus years later, Priscilla Buckley invited me to take over the "Protracted Conflict" column from Jim Burnham, whom I regarded, and still regard, as my only mentor in the art of thinking straight about politics.

Seventeen years after my cover story, the general consensus has removed the question mark, and not for the first time. In the eyes of earlier sages (I am thinking, for instance, of one Louis J. Halle, author of an elegantly written and deeply misleading book, The Cold War as History), the cold war was already over in the 1960s, courtesy of Nikita Khrushchev.

Today, journalists and politicians alike refer daily to "the post-cold-war period," meaning now. So, is "The Protracted Conflict" truly over at last, third time round? My answer is: No, not quite. What has happened is that the Soviet Union, which in 1944 launched what Burnham called World War III, precursor of the cold war, has been spectacularly losing it over the past few years. I wish I could say that we, the West, have been winning, but that's not the way it is.

The clues to Mikhail Gorbachev's strategy are all there, if we will only take the trouble to look. First: Gorbachev is a Leninist. He has said so, repeatedly. In a virtually unreported speech on February 13, 1987, he compared the disastrous situation at that time with the situation Lenin faced in 1918, which forced him to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the victorious Germans. Like Lenin, comrades (he said, in effect), we will make sacrifices, and resume our forward march later.

His talk of a "common European home" is strictly Leninist, as is his current parasitical coexistence: hoping the West will pay for the free market which, kicking and screaming, he is now being forced to inject into the sclerotic Marxian economy.

There is, however, a big snag: only tiny, feeble attempts have been made so far to convert the enormous Soviet arms industry to civilian needs. In a speech at the 28th Party Congress on July 3, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze made two shattering revelations.

The first was that the Soviet Union had been spending 25 per cent of its GNP on "defense" (far higher than the highest CIA estimates). His other revelation, however, was more directly relevant to the Protracted Conflict/ Cold War/Peaceful Coexistence issue. Indeed, he provided us with yet another synonym for our thesaurus. Over the past twenty years, he said, the Soviet Union had spent 700 billion rubles on "ideological confrontation" with the West. Divide by twenty, and you get a cold-war budget of 35 billion rubles a year. True, Moscow cab drivers don't take rubles these days, but even if you do some deflationary arithmetic, you get a tidy sum going to active measures, disinformation, and dirty tricks. In other words, to the cold war.

Now, up to the present, there is absolutely no sign that the vast machine handling this kind of activity has been dismantled. Indeed, it is known to be ticking over, mainly but not entirely in Third World countries. And it would be surprising if it were not so, considering that the restructuring of this apparatus was Gorbachev's top priority under perestroika.

So, do we really want to pay for the cold war to continue? If we do, then we shall provide financial aid to the Soviet Union without linkage. If we don't, the relevant linkage is easy to define: it means the verifiable disbanding of Service A (for Active Measures) of the KGB and the rest of the cold-war apparatus.

If you say that this is impossible so long as the unelected Party and its unelected president are still in office, then I can only agree. The system is unreformable. Be kind to History: let the system die. Let something new take its place: perhaps a commonwealth of Slavic States (Russia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia), with peripheral republics (Georgia, Azerbaidzhan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, etc.) linked with it or not. In this set-up, Boris Yeltsin, the man who tore up his Party card, will be the new man the West can "do business with" (to quote Mrs. Thatcher's unfortunate phrase .

The Last Bastions

MEANWHILE, how does Communism fare outside the Soviet Union? So far, the only European countries in which it has collapsed are Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and of course East Germany. East Germany was lucky: it had a rich, democratic big brother ready to take over and pick up the tab. Indeed, Chancellor Kohl bought some pretty imposing linkage for those billions of D-Marks: nobody expected reunification to come that fast. Others are learning about capitalism and democracy the hard way.

In Rumania and (to a lesser degree) in Bulgaria, the Communists changed their name, monopolized the media, intimidated the voters, and had themselves elected into apparently legitimate power. In all of those countries, including the ones that did break away, the KGB and the local security and intelligence services played the leading role in provoking the upheavals that brought the hated regimes crashing down. It was the Brezhnev Doctrine in reverse, demolishing "socialism" instead of sending in the Soviet Army to preserve it, so that the West could see something fundamental had changed.

All the Eastern European secret services were created by Stalin's NKVD; all worked for the KGB under central control starting in 1964. There is strong evidence that the remnants of all of them have been absorbed by Gorbachev's KGB. That, too, is part of the cold-war apparatus.

Political perestroika, meanwhile, reached distant countries in the Soviet Union's peripheral empire this year. Even the ruthless Ethiopian dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, announced in March that a multi-party system would be acceptable-though the continuing civil war isn't making any such change easier. The huge but sparsely populated Mongolian People's Republic (the very first Soviet satellite, set up in 1924) took the plunge in July with elections that pushed the ruling People's Revolutionary Party to the sidelines after seventy years of untrammeled power.

The aged leaders of the Chinese People's Republic showed what they thought of perestroika with last year's massacre in Tiananmen Square. Alone of the Communist regimes, China's is independent of Soviet subsidies, having in effect opted out of satellite status with the Sino-Soviet rift of 1960-61. After the rift, Red China went into the revolution business in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But this "competitive subversion" died down in the 1970s, with the significant exception of Kampuchea, where Peking supported the Ehmer Rouge through Pol Pot's genocidal regime. Pot and arms the Khmer Rouge. No solution to the Kampuchean problem is conceivable without Peking's consent.

It seems unlikely that the Chinese Communists will resume their old policy of external subversion in the short term. Should they still be in power when Hong Kong comes under Chinese sovereignty in 1997, however, this could change. But will the Communist regime survive? The economic consequences of the Tiananmen massacre have been dire. Next time round, the People's Liberation Army will not necessarily side with the survivors of Mao Tse-tung's Long March.

In neighboring Vietnam (as indeed in Laos), the Communist regime retains its hold. Despite its military evacuation of Kampuchea, it remains a player in the game of Yampuchean independence.

In North Korea, Kim Il Sung, now 75, tried tentatively a couple of years ago to break out of his country's isolation by attracting Western tourists and investment. This provoked a split between hard-liners and "liberals." After the repression in China, Pyongyang's hard-liners duly reasserted their ascendancy. Despite the recent meeting of North and South Koreans at Panmunjom of Korean War memory, Kim's problem is insoluble: how to preserve a family dictatorship, comparable in ruthlessness with Ceausescu's, and also open the country to the rich world outside.

Afghanistan remains a special case. Although the Soviet Union tacitly conceded defeat by withdrawing its invading force, American diplomacy handed strategic victory to the Communist side. The Shultz-Shevardnadze Accords of 1988 ruled out continuing U.S. supplies to the mujahedin, while enabling Soviet supplies to the Najibullah regime to continue.

Fidel Castro's Cuba has been by far the most active and effective of the Soviet surrogates in the Third World. From the start, Castro made it clear that he rejected Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost. Castro was powerless, however, to prevent last February's electoral defeat of his protoges, the Sandinistas, in Nicaragua, as he was powerless to prevent the transformation of little liberated Grenada. Before the events in Eastern Europe, Cuba was receiving aid from the Soviet Union at the rate of some $4 to $5 billion a year (roughly what Vietnam was costing Moscow at the same time). Now, the Cuban dictator is in deep crisis. Soviet deliveries of oil have been cut, depriving the Cubans of a surplus for re-export-their biggest source of hard currency.

A Soviet commission now in session is reviewing Moscow's preferential terms for trade with Cuba. As recently as August 13, however, Gennadi Yanayev, of Gorbachev's Politburo, told Pravda that U.S. attempts to link economic ties with the USSR to its abandonment of economic cooperation with Cuba were "totally unacceptable." Back to the cold war.

Old habits do die hard. The Soviets were deeply involved in the major offensive launched by the Communist MPLA government in Angola against the anti-Communist UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi last December and stretching into the spring.

And it is worth reflecting that the Soviets still see South Africa as one of their ultimate prizes. The other day Joe Slovo, the Lithuanian-born leader of South Africa's Communist Party (a close ally of Nelson Mandela's ANC) was in Moscow. Gennadi Yanayev (quoted above) saw him and reaffirmed Soviet solidarity with the South African Communists and the ANC.

The conflict, alas, just goes on protracting.