We won.

IN THE first issue of NATIONAL REVIEW, published on November 19, 1955, we announced that we were "irrevocably" at war against Communism, and that we would oppose any substitute for victory. Thirty-six years later, Communism was banned within the Soviet Union.

It was a very long haul, and although Richard Nixon, writing a year ago and perhaps anticipating the delirious events of the last ten days in August 1991, was substantially correct when he said that the West didn't win the war, the Communists lost it, that verdict has to be qualified to make room for major and minor players. Where, to drop perhaps the biggest single name of them all, would we have been without Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? He and a dozen other major figures from the Soviet Union earned their places in Freedom's House of Lords. The crowds in Russia, descendants of the men and women who stormed the Winter Palace, placed themselves between the Soviet tanks and the White House that sheltered Boris Yeltsin, and pledged their lives anmd their sacred honor to preserving the fetus of Russian constitutionalism. And they prevailed.

In the West there were, everywhere, steadfast friends of liberty, but by no means can it be said that they dominated the public policy of the West. That can be said of only one figure. it was Ronald Reagan, history is sure to confirm, who suddenly forced the leaders of Soviet Communism to look in the mirror, and what they beheld was their advanced emaciation. The other superpower, thought to have been castrated by the defeat in Vietnam, was deploying theater nuclear weapons in Europe, shattering any prospect of Soviet political ultimatums directed at Bonn, Paris, and London. Moreover, the leader of the bourgeois world was determined to launch a program which the technological genius of America would almost certainly permit absolutely to frustrate a Soviet first strike, and therefore any political advantage that might accrue from threatening such a strike. It was, moreover, the same leader who had resurrected the moral argument, so successfully etiolated by a generation of ambiguists. He spoke of the Soviet Union as an evil empire! He said that history would consign Communism to the ash heap: transforming Lenin's own words as an ode to historical determinism!

And then, quickly it began to take over. The war in Afghanistan, never mind that 1.4 million resisters had been killed, was not ending, and the same American President had authorized the use of a weapon that vitiated the usefulness of the Soviet air force. The economy was ceasing to move. A new Soviet leader, having recognized that Afghanistan would not be conquered, attempted to review the morale of a deadened culture with injections of freedom, and its results were magical, the whole Soviet thinking world suddenly heard from, intoxicated by the glasnost license. Structural reforms were, if not permitted, at least debated. The final failure of the long design to overcome Europe, frustrated now by American nuclear missils, vitiated the importance of continuing military colonization of Eastern Europe; and one after another they peeled off. The debated reforms brought a crisis, the sentiment hardening all over the land that there had to be not talk about reforms, but reforms; and on the eve of the first important one of these, a reconstitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist states, the dissenters raised their mailed fist in a final show of defiance. Within 48 hours, the mandarinate that controlled the principal instruments of force, the KGB and the military, fell. We would learn that the eight leaders who sought to stem the tide were during most of those critical hours drunk on vodka. They had for most of their lives been intoxicated by more noxious matter. Before the end of the week, the Communist Party was legally suspended.

We won.

I am uniquely situated to summon the memory of men and women associated with this journal, whose birth was substantially motivated by the historical calling for a moral-analytical journalistic distillery to animate the resistance to Communism. Mr. Nixon was right. We should have won the war against Communism before Yalta's first anniversay, and he was right in suggesting the many lost opportunities which, had we moved otherwise, might have spared millions their lives, and tens of millions those years of that terrible, empty grief that oppression brings. But this was the journal James Burnham spent 25 years with. It was here Whittaker Chambers came, however briefly, back to life, after pronouncing that in leaving Communism he had probably left the winning side. It was here that John Does Passos, and Max Eastman, and Frank Meyer--I restrict myself to those men and women who are dead--labored, in this heady vineyard of anti-Communism, distilling, analyzing, pleading. October 20, 1956, an editorial, "The Ghosts Are Restless":

Twenty years ago Communism seemed to reach an ultimate level of the macabre in the mad Purge Trials, with their self-destroying confessions of impossible deeds, and their aftermath of rubber-soled executions in the cellars of the Lubyanka. The Trials, however, sink back to the banal in the wild light of the unwinding process now going on in Eastern Europe.

Seven years ago in Hungary four Communist leaders were put to death and buried in dishonored ground, as "bourgeois nationalists," Titoists, and agents of U.S. intelligence: the then--Foreign Minister, Laszlo Rajk, along with General Georgy Palffy, Dr. Tibor Szoeny, and Andras Szalai. Last week the rotted corpses of these four men were exhumed, exposed in great biers mounted in the center of Budapest, and made ready for reburial in a new cemetery designed as a national pantheon.

The godless anti-religion of Communism is driven to complete the symbolic cycle of its black inversion of true religion. To its myriad rites of crucifixion, it now adds a blasphemous resurrection.

On a single day two hundred thousand Hungarians walked past these biers--not by command in the usual Communist mode, but spontaneously, by individuals and family groups. They were silent, but what was in their hearts? Under totalitarian rule, where so little can be uttered, we must look deep. At the literal level the whole issue was from the mass point of view a senseless dispute between rival sets of jailers. For all the people knew, the exhuming was only an excuse for a new round of killings; with another shift in political line next year, the four corpses might be thrown in a lime pit.

But surely those vast throngs were telling each other and us that it is their buried freedom that they mourn for, and its future resurrection for which they hope and wait.

Two weeks later, those Hungarians on whom James Burnham had his eye did exactly that: they resurrected their freedom. Three weeks later, they were mostly dead, run over by Russian tanks, some of them, others of them hanged or imprisoned.

But the spirit was regenerated, and every month, every year, the writers in NATIONAL REVIEW did what they could to press hope, and to maintain the moral perspective. We are justly proud that one of our readers became the leader of the Free World, who exercised the critical voice in the critical deliberations of the Eighties.

And, on bended knee, we give thanks to Providence for the transfiguration of Russia, thanks from those of us who lived to see it, and thanks to those, departed, who helped us to understand why it was right to struggle to sustain the cause of Western civilization.