She was right: Jeane Kirkpatrick, statesman and intellectual.

THE most important story about Jeane Kirkpatrick was told by Jay Nordlinger in his NRO tribute to her: "Facing a group of visiting American dignitaries, [Andrei Sakharov] said, 'Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski, which of you is Kirkpatski?' Others gestured to Jeane. He said, 'Your name is known in every cell in the Gulag.' The reason was, she had named the names of Soviet political prisoners, on the floor of the U.N."

A similar story is told about President Reagan by the anti-Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who discovered in some Soviet archives a document he had painstakingly typed out himself years before. It was a list of Gulag prisoners he had handed to Reagan with the request that the president ask for their release at a superpower summit. Reagan had in turn handed it to Gorbachev.

Every now and then these leaders received some evidence that their pressure had not been ignored--the release of a Sharansky. But even when their pleas were rejected by the Kremlin, they gave hope to its victims. They had not been forgotten; for a few days at least their guards would be more wary, less brutal; the world knew their names and their plight. They were in purgatory, not hell.

If Jeane Kirkpatrick had done nothing else in her life but read those names out at the U.N., she would deserve praise and celebration. It is no small thing to give hope to the hopeless. But that particular moment was also the crystallization of her many contributions as both a public intellectual and a statesman.

Kirkpatrick took up an important distinction in political science--that between authoritarian dictatorships and totalitarian ones--and applied it fruitfully (and controversially) to U.S. foreign policy in the period when the Sandinistas were seizing Nicaragua and the Ayatollah was replacing the Shah. Her argument was that totalitarian regimes were manifestly worse than authoritarian ones since the latter allowed their subjects significant civil and intellectual freedom outside the realm of actual government. Totalitarianism, however, ruled and intruded on every aspect of life. Such regimes were not only incompatible with a liberal world order in principle, they were allied to the major anti-Western powers in practice. U.S. foreign policy should not therefore support the overthrow of authoritarian rulers if the alternative seemed likely to be totalitarians hostile to America. That would only make matters worse for everyone. So U.S. human-rights policy should place a higher priority on helping the innocent prisoners in the Gulag and its Asian equivalents. That would advance both human rights and U.S. interests.

These arguments, expressed most powerfully in her Commentary essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards," won the admiration of Ronald Reagan. They met and realized that they were political soul-mates--long-time Democrats unhappy with their old party, Cold Warriors, American patriots, and tough-minded believers in liberty. Appointed to Reagan's Cabinet as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Kirkpatrick became an eloquent spokesman for American values in public forums and a close ally of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and CIA chief William Casey in private on such matters as helping the Contras and resisting the commitment of U.S. forces in Lebanon. (She could never work out what the U.S. forces were supposed to accomplish.) She lost that battle, but she won most of them--both because Reagan was of like mind and because he liked her. After one especially bruising debate between Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Al Haig, Reagan got up to leave, changed his mind, walked around the table, and kissed her to mark his regard.

But what pleased Reagan infuriated the Left. Kirkpatrick was accused of being sympathetic to authoritarian regimes and of possessing a streak of authoritarianism herself. Her support for human rights as a weapon against the Soviets was twisted to make it sound as if she were advocating neglect of prisoners and subjects under authoritarian governments. And a small academic and journalistic cottage industry was established to knock down her broad thesis that authoritarians, with all their manifest faults, were nonetheless generally to be preferred to totalitarians when there was no democratic alternative on offer. Three points were at issue: Were totalitarians really more oppressive? Were they less successful economically? And were they less capable of evolving peacefully into democracies?

Despite the Left's best efforts, there is really no doubt that Kirkpatrick was correct on the first two points--and the fortuitous death of Pinochet a few days after her own produced columns and debates that illustrated her victory in statistics. If the number of murders committed by a political system is a good test of its oppressiveness, then the totalitarians win hands down. Their total of victims runs to over 100 million. A comparison of two Latin American dictators, authoritarian Pinochet and totalitarian Castro, is even more revealing: Castro murdered three times as many people as Pinochet in executions, prison, informal murders, etc. But if we also include the boat people deliberately murdered on the high seas, Castro killed 20 times more innocents than Pinochet.

The test of economic progress produces the same lopsided result. Communism collapsed, among other reasons, because it failed economically. It could not feed its people, it lagged technologically, and its shops were full of substandard goods that few wanted and empty of goods for which there was a massive demand. Cuba and North Korea, which remain fully totalitarian, are economic ruins in which people literally starve. One terrible result is the spread in Cuba of prostitution among middle-class women whose earnings from their formal professions are too low to support their families. Spain and Chile by contrast emerged from their authoritarian experience (under Franco and Pinochet respectively) as successful modern economies. Both are among the leading economies in their regions. Again, it is game, set, and match to Kirkpatrick.

And shortly after her death, Jeane scored a posthumous triumph when a Washington Post editorial on Pinochet's death declared that she had won on the third point: Chile had evolved peacefully into a democracy whereas Cuba remains sunk in dictatorship. As far as it goes, that encomium is justified. But then Castro is still alive--just. How will things look in ten years' time? Kirkpatrick's critics had, after all, pointed to the peaceful transformation of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in 1989 as disproving her claim that totalitarianism was a despotic dead end. And on that they seemed to have at least half a point.

Late last year, however, an Australian scholar, Aviezer Tucker, published some early results from his research into the differing fates of post-authoritarian and post-totalitarian societies in the Australian public-policy journal Society. These results--of which Jeane was happily aware--showed that she had been correct on her third contention. Post-authoritarian societies evolve into recognizably democratic societies with free speech, meaningful elections, a rule of law, the replacement of the old authoritarian elites by new ones, and--after an interval--justice for past crimes. But post-totalitarian societies are too wounded and misshapen, as a result of the attempt to create an entirely new social order, to return to a normal civilization and democracy. They continue to be ruled by the old nomenklaturas, in particular by their old secret-police networks, which seize the properties of the totalitarian state but, instead of managing them in a capitalist fashion, gradually consume the assets. In such a society, there is no real rule of law, no safe property rights, no genuine competition between political parties, no replacement of the old elites, and no justice for past crimes--or indeed for future crimes.

Putin's Russia is the clearest example of this post-totalitarian society. Its KGB state controls the mass media, seizes whatever property it wishes, and seemingly uses intimidation and murder as political tools. The former security services exercise unaccountable political power throughout the former Soviet bloc, as a recent New York Times investigative article on Bulgaria pointed out. Seventeen years after the velvet revolutions of 1989, governments in Poland and elsewhere are seeking to bring them under democratic control. Until they do, the post-totalitarian state cannot be said to have reached democracy. When they do, such a long apprenticeship will have made Kirkpatrick's point.

It would be nice if she were as celebrated in liberal academia as in the cells of the Gulag. But some prisons are more secure than others.