The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe.

• Author: Stone, Norman

SOME TIME IN early 1988, Zbigniew Brzezinski came to London and lectured on "the spring-time of peoples." On the evidence of pamphlets and "feel," he said that communism would soon be over. There would be rebellion everywhere, and the nations would claim freedom. By his title, "Spring-time of Peoples," he was evoking 1848. In that year, the buds leafed in February, there was a revolt in Paris, and revolt followed, nearly everywhere else in Central Europe, within weeks. The old men of the old order slunk away, and for a time there was a carnival atmosphere.

Sovietskaya Estonia, for November 18, 1988, proclaimed "The Estonian people on the shores of the Baltic Sea has been cultivating the land and developing its own culture for more than five thousand years." The Estonian declaration of sovereignty, a fantastic-seeming piece of impudence was the start of a chain reaction that brought down the Soviet Union. Within a year, the Wall was down, and the world got an extra Christmas present, with the fall of Ceausescu. Then came the end of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union itself. Tiny Estonia became formally independent, and so too did Russia, under Yeltsin. Brzezinski proved quite right.

But the trouble with 1848 is that it led nowhere. The spring-time of peoples turned out to be a collection of buds that withered before they could ripen. The old order had kept the levers of power, the church, and the army. The new order fell apart. Nations, proudly declared, went for each other's throats. Urban riots developed as market economies went wrong: by June, even a stalwart radical such as Victor Hugo, seeing the rebellious proletarians, could say that "you must shoot them down, while respecting them." Worst of all, the peasants backed up the old order. They had been emancipated by the revolutionaries, but, with property or the chance of it, they lost interest in revolution. Garibaldi later complained that he could get help from every class of Italian in his fight with the Papacy and the Austrian Empire, except for the peasants. So the old order came back. But it was an old order that had been forced to learn, and was now intelligent, energetic, adaptable. Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, appealed to for clemency in victory, agreed, but insisted, "First a little hanging." The revolutionaries had made silly mistakes, and deserved all the contempt that the serious writers of the epoch--Flaubert and Tocqueville--poured upon them. But in the end, it was the synthesis of revolution and reaction that was interesting. The administrative techniques and the economic practices of classical liberalism were adopted by re-energized ancien regimes, and this synthesis quite soon produced Bismarck and Cavour. And there is at least the suspicion that it is 1849, rather than 1848, that now applies as presiding spirit in post-communism. I should like to hear Dr. Brzezinski lecture, now, on 1849.

Here, however, are four Quarantottesco books, all Liberty on the Barricades, beards striking poses, Etude revolutionnaire throbbing away. With the exception of Anatol Lieven's book, which is vaguely elegiac, they are euphoric in tone. Of course this is entirely understandable: who could fail to cheer, in August 1991, as Uncle Ebenezer Kryutchkov was led off the stage in handcuffs, to...