Pravda will out.

IN LATE MAY, Sergei Shakhrai, an aide to Boris Yeltsin, announced to reporters that a cache of thousands of Communist Party documents had been discovered that detailed the Kremlin's financing of international terrorism since the mid 1970s. Some $20 million a year, as well as weapons, went to organizations like the Palestinian PFLP, for example, "to carry out operations against American and Israeli personnel in third countries," Shakhrai said, and "to carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism." ism." Some of the documents are to be released in a court case testing the legality of Yeltsin's ban on the Communist Party as a "criminal organization."

It was yet another of the breathtaking revelations vindicating what many of us were saying all along. A special tribute goes to Brian Crozier, Claire Sterling, Alexander Haig, and Ronald Reagan, among others, who made this case in the early 1980s, only to be hooted at by those either blind to or uncomfortable with the vile reality of Soviet policy.

Russian authorities are doing the world--and themselves--a great service by coming clean. They must be congratulated for their honesty and encouraged to let the full truth emerge. Revealing the truth about the past is not of interest just to historians; nothing more definitively underscores the break with the Communist past and its discredited political and economic system. The foundation of trust the Russians need to build under the new East-West relations depends on it. Conversely, the successor-KGB's reticence about its past--especially when accompanied by its continued industrial espionage in the present--raises doubts about how systematic a change has in fact occurred.