until his death on September 14, 1991.

May 23, 2009: Thinking Again About Communism, III. The USSR on the Eve of Perestroika: Lenin Billboard & Car, Rostov-on-the-Don (Russia), USSR. "To Us the Most Precious Is the Preservation of Peace -- V.I. Lenin," the slogan on the billboard says. The year is 1984.

Lenin died in 1924. (More in

SHIFT CHANGE

Katowice Coal Mine, Poland, 1981

May 22, 2009: Speaking of the fall (or not) of communism (see "All Rise," May 21, 2009, below), we are in the primetime of the twentieth anniversaries of the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe.

The year 1989 saw the second "Springtime of Nations." In astonishment, and uncertainty, the outside world, and even the political actors within the various members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, watched as events unfolded and limits were pushed.

Now, twenty years later, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, serves as a stand-in for all the regime changes that year. And the violent climax of the downfall of all the Soviet-bloc regimes in Eastern Europe came on Christmas Day, in Romania, when the just-deposed former leader Nicolae Ceausescu -- and his wife -- were executed by firing squad.

But the Polish story should not be overlooked. Timothy Garton-Ash believes "to this day that the Round Table -- that is to say, the negotiated revolution -- was a particularly Polish discovery, and is in a way Poland's gift from 1989 to the world."

The backstory includes the founding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in August 1980, and its rise and rise until it was crushed in December 1981. When I took photographs all over Poland in the summer of 1981 (including the coal miners in Katowice, above), it was obvious how entrenched Solidarity was in the workplaces, and in society more generally. At its height, there were said to be ten million members, out of a population of thirty-some million.

That summer, and into the fall, there was nervous speculation as to whether the Soviet Union would invade; it was the era of Leonid Brezhnev and the Brezhnev Doctrine ('what we have, we hold'). But in the end, on December 13, 1981, Poland's own leaders imposed martial law. Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were thrown in jail.

Solidarity came back to life again after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow and seemed to embrace the possibilities of reform in other communist countries besides his own. Still, as Garton-Ash testifies, "You have to remember that nobody knew what would happen next and nobody knew what the Soviet Union would accept."

ALL RISE: COMMUNISM FALLS?

The 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

May 21, 2009: Today, in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama made a rather strange statement for someone who is supposed to be so bright, and who is in charge of the national security apparatus of the U.S.

Here is the wind-up: "Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world."

Okay. Then: Enemy soldiers...strong alliances....

Then, "It's the reason why we've been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty."

"...outlast the iron curtain of communism...."

Oh, yes? The People's Republic of China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, has fallen? (and the regimes in Cuba, and North Korea, and Vietnam....)

Twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan came back from his first trip to what he previously had been pleased to call "Red China" and spoke of the "so-called Communist China." This was in 1984, five years after the Carter administration had recognized the People's Republic of China, and Reagan had attacked the president for doing so.

In the fall of 2007, at the time of the most recent Chinese Communist Party Congress, I showed an American in Beijing a copy of the photograph above, taken at the previous Congress, the 16th (November 2002). He looked at the giant hammer and sickle and said, Oh, Russia.

Whatever one may think of what has happened since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communists have not ruled there since December 1991, while in China they go on and on. So far.

IF NIXON CAN GO TO CHINA

NETANYAHU CAN...

May 18-19, 2009: Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu comes to Washington. The "Nixon-to-China" cliches come out again.

If Richard Nixon can go to China, perhaps Bibi Netanyahu can -- Fill in your chief wish for an Israeli prime minister.

For a recent example: "Just as it took a Richard Nixon to go to China, it will take a Netanyahu to enforce a peace settlement that will require a withdrawal from most of the West Bank settlements." -- Kishore Mahbubani, Japan Times, Sunday, May 10, 2009

But Netanyahu has been here before, and so have we.

He was Prime Minister the first time from 1996-99. "He wants to be Nixon going to China and still be honored by the John Birch Society," we were told. By Thomas L. Friedman, in the May 19, 1998, New York Times. Friedman was asking, "Who Is Bibi?"

We might ask, why do we keep falling back on this cliche?

INDIA VOTES

May 17, 2009: India went to the polls, and surprised the pollsters and the experts. The Congress Party won an "emphatic" victory, seen as clearing the way for the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to enact further economic reforms. The Prime Minister (left) is pictured here with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

RED STARS

May 16, 2009: Twenty years ago today the Communist giants met, in Beijing, for the first time in three decades. Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made the trip to China for talks with Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, and Zhao Ziyang, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

The leaders met in the Great Hall of the People. In the ceiling of its vast auditorium is the red star of communism (above, right). The Soviets were the seniors in revolution, the Bolsheviks having taken power in Russia in 1917; the People's Republic of China was not founded until 1949. As can been seen in the sample of a Soviet red star (left), the USSR placed special additional emphasis on its contribution to the victory over the Fascists/Nazis.

Gorbachev was himself a star when he came to Beijing -- to the outside world, certainly, for the reforms he had undertaken back in the USSR -- perestroika and glasnost'. He also had admirers among the Chinese, including some of those demonstrating in Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing, when he arrived.

The story of the Sino-Soviet rapprochement brought the international media, and the Tiananmen demonstrations provided a dramatic story just waiting to be broadcast. The denouement was the crackdown of June 3-4, 1989.

Zhao Ziyang lost his post, and lived out his life under house arrest. His memoirs are just now being published.

Mikhail Gorbachev went back to Moscow to continue his attempts to reform the USSR. The USSR dissolved into its constituent parts ("Republics") at the end of 1991.

Jiang Zemin was brought from Shanghai to be the new General Secretary, and Deng Xiaoping remained the power behind the throne unto death. The People's Republic of China is due to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary on October 1, 2009.

Arguments raged about which path to reform was superior, the Soviet or the Chinese. Which was the brighter "Red Star," Gorbachev or Deng?

WHITE SANDS