THIRTY YEARS AGO.

The rump Communist dictatorship of Mikhail Gorbachev stood on Lenin's tomb for one last wallow in their past.  By Christmas, western style, there no longer was a Soviet Union, and all the free stuff the comrades were guaranteed was worth about as much as a ticket to a Milwaukee World Series.

We could observe the non-observance of the Great October Socialist Revolution, except for the hazy nostalgia that has sprung up since then.

Cathy Young, who once lived there, correctly observes, "Nearly every form of Soviet nostalgia gets the facts wrong."  That might be a Friday short take, apart from the re-emergence of the pernicious notions of free stuff in United States politics.

On social media today, "tankies" with hammer-and-sickle emojis in their usernames and Marx or Lenin profile headers are a loud and proud faction of lefty Twitter. These are overwhelmingly young people, in their 20s and sometimes late teens, steeped in the racial and sexual identity politics of their generation of activists, often sporting gender pronouns and rainbow flags in their bios along with the communist symbology. Many seem convinced that actual Soviet-style communism—not just the "hasn't been tried" utopian ideal—was an admirable vision. "The more I read about the Soviet Union the more obvious it becomes why the west had to demonize it," writes a "queer," "anti-imperialist" Twitter user with the colorful moniker "hezbolleninism." "The USSR's ideology was not only a threat to capitalism, it was a threat to white supremacy."

That's all psycho talk, but that's the point of calling attention to the nostalgia. It's wise to read the article in full. Here's the conclusion.

By the end of its existence, the Soviet Union was an exhausted totalitarian regime trying to maintain its grip on a society that laughed at official pieties, craved consumer goods, was thrilled by the forbidden, and idolized the West. The woman on the bus who had thought it was ridiculous to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire" came to mind, seven or eight years later, when I saw a photo of a rally in Moscow. A sign was being held by someone who, like me, had lived under the reality of communism. It said: "THE USSR: YES, IT IS THE EVIL EMPIRE!"

Let's go, Brandon.

The current issue of Reason is apparently a retrospective on the end of the Evil Empire, and Katherine Mangu-Ward elaborates on why failing to remember the past matters.

It is hard now, in the relative material comfort of the current apocalypse, to comprehend the constant grinding scarcity and existential dread that was humanity's constant companion during the Cold War. And the current manifestations of communism benefit hugely from the material surplus generated by globalization, though perhaps in a way that is ultimately illusory and as unsustainable for them as the Soviet version turned out to be.

The question of whether things are really more dire for humanity than they were in, say, the late 1960s is difficult to answer. Do the hands of the clock capture real threats or just reflect a perverse kind of apocalypse satiation? It may well be that all times are, in fact, the interesting times that the apocryphal Chinese curse wishes upon us.

Those were the days, my friend, and more than a few of us were grateful for the fall of 1989, when there was a Crumbled Communist Regime of the Month Club, and for the peaceful end of the Soviet Union at Christmas, 1991.  The tidying up that remains for people who lived through those days is to ensure that the objective conditions are not favorable for any form of communism.