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■ Economic collapse forces the Soviet leadership to turn away from Communism and embark on a radical economic restructuring. Sound familiar? But the year is 1921. The man stabbing Karl Marx in the back isn’t Gorbachev or Yeltsin: it’s Lenin himself.

When Paul Craig Roberts’s Alienation and the Soviet Economy (The Independent Institute, 148 pp., $14.95) first appeared in 1971, the demise of Communism wasn’t even a gleam in an ideologue’s eye. Yet this analysis of Lenin’s writings and speeches demonstrates persuasively that the father of the Soviet state was himself skeptical that Russia could survive pure Communism.

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■ Economic collapse forces the Soviet leadership to turn away from Communism and embark on a radical economic restructuring. Sound familiar? But the year is 1921. The man stabbing Karl Marx in the back isn’t Gorbachev or Yeltsin: it’s Lenin himself.

When Paul Craig Roberts’s Alienation and the Soviet Economy (The Independent Institute, 148 pp., $14.95) first appeared in 1971, the demise of Communism wasn’t even a gleam in an ideologue’s eye. Yet this analysis of Lenin’s writings and speeches demonstrates persuasively that the father of the Soviet state was himself skeptical that Russia could survive pure Communism.