Nixon: Split 'em, the way we split the Communist monolith by playing the China card against the Soviets.

One key measure in Mr. Yeltsin's program is to cut off Russia's financing of the mass of central government ministries that were the heart of the Soviet Communist monolith.

Those very figures formed the junta that sought to restore the Communist monolith, the junta that Mr. Yeltsin finally faced down.

"Communist monolith" evoked a world of "dominoes," in which the fall of Vietnam would result in the collapse of Europe.

"This will open the road to a new political union," Mr. Pliusch declared, warning that the economic treaty amounted to a "blackmail" attempt at reviving the hated centralized structures of the Communist monolith.

He was then carried headlong into republicanism by the coup events that brought down the remnants of the Communist monolith.

A Shattered Monolith As a result, the Government sometimes resembles not so much a Communist monolith as a disorganized conglomerate.

FOR half a century Russia, in the Western mind, was the Soviet Union - the Communist monolith behind the Iron Curtain.

There was no immediate indication of how the pact, once the bulwark of the Communist monolith, might be transformed.

The difference is that because of his earlier attempts to encourage greater openness and debate, Soviet society is no longer a Communist monolith.