The Soviet Union had held on longer than its Eastern European satellites, but on August 19 the hard-liners forced the issue with their coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The resistance was led by Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic, and on August 22 the coup collapsed. Mr. Buckley starts off, "We all burst out with spontaneous joy on the 22nd of August: We had won.... Now, between the time of Hiroshima and the time that we won, I went from being a minor to being a senior citizen, and it seems to me that those years in between, relatively painless for me and for you, were climactically painful for millions of people. So we are entitled to ask: . . . From what we now know, how might we have accelerated the demise of this great totalitarian monster?" Mr. Pipes answers straightforwardly: "I don't think we could have done much about that. It had to collapse essentially of its internal crisis. And I think, if anything, we accelerated it by the policies adopted by President Reagan. I would not give him credit for the collapse, but I think he contributed to it by his psychological willingness to stand up to Communism." And we're off on a splendid discussion ranging from the history of Communism around the world to the likely "balkanization" of the Soviet empire.