In October 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the nascent Hungarian Revolution and the national aspirations it represented, the communist empire seemed at its apex. With a strong leader, a command economy, and an iron will, it seemed undeniable that the West, with all its messy deliberation, would be unable to compete.

Yet Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a young Harvard scholar, saw things differently. Fluent in Russian, he had traveled throughout the Soviet Union and was struck by its underlying weakness. In particular, he noticed that barely half the crowd at a soccer game in Soviet Georgia bothered to rise for the national anthem. Click here to read the full-text article