Perhaps the central message of the collapse of Soviet communism can be summed up as follows: If it is to survive and flourish on the world stage, Russia needs to develop a different kind of realpolitik. Perhaps the central message of the collapse of Soviet communism can be...

Africa is on the rise, while Russia is on the decline. The democratic idealism that accompanied the fall of communism 20 years ago is gone, but the "imperial pride" recovered during the Putin years may not be enough to compensate for the contempt with which the Russian state treats its citizens. . Russia is not Egypt. And Moscow is not on the...

... that resulted from his democratic reforms. But Yeltsin fooled everybody. He allowed a small number of well-connected Russians to get very wealthy while leaving tens of millions to barely survive. Rephrasing British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, communism may have been a terrible system, but all of the others, including Yeltsin's "democracy," turned out to be much worse. After having been robbed and plundered for so long, I have no doubt that the Russian people would choose a real Bolshevik...

... to be world leaders, not followers of Third World nations. Indeed, over the past century, Moscow has been the center of the international Communist movement, the focus of the worldwide fight against fascism and the capital of a global empire. Even as communism foundered, developments in Moscow were what started velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. A visit by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to Beijing that same year inspired pro-democracy rallies on Tiananmen Square, which became the starting...

... Western hubris have been dealt severe blows in recent years. But for those in the West overtaken by fatalism and self-doubt, a message of hope is now emanating from the Arab Spring and from the resumption in Russia of the unfinished revolution that ended communism. Nor has the inconsistency between China's capitalism and its lack of civil liberties been resolved yet. A Chinese Spring cannot be ruled out. The West faces serious challenges — as it always has. But the values of human freedom and dignity...

... on new bank lending to firms or households. In fact, the causality is the reverse. The reason why government interest rates in Britain and elsewhere are so low is that interest rates for private-sector loans are so high. As with "the specter of communism" that haunted Europe in Karl Marx's famous manifesto, so today "all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise" the specter of national debt. But policymakers who aim to liquidate the debt should recall...

... Republic, Hungary and Ukraine are exploring similar developments, it is Poland that offers the most promise. "Look at the history of Poland," Buggenhagen told a recent shale gas conference in Warsaw. "We are only 23 years from the fall of communism, and we are in an energy rush with a country that has been reliant on coal and on supplies from the east." At Chevron's site outside Lesniowice, head of drilling Tim Nowak and his crew are doing all they can to make that happen. The site...