Years later, Diana Mosley claimed that the Duke and Duchess shared her and her husband's views that Hitler should have been given a free hand to destroy Communism.

"I promised you when I saw you last year that I would destroy Communism, and I was as good as my word," one participant quoted him as saying.

Mr. Gorbachev's gradualism was brilliantly suited to the complex task of destroying Communism from within.

"Every enterprise ripped out of the state and transferred to the hands of a private owner was a way of destroying Communism in Russia," one high-ranking official told Hoffman.

Some people look for an explanation to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the man who destroyed Communism but failed to build anything in its place.

"They felt they were destroying Communism," said Shpetim Bajrani, a 19-year-old shopkeeper.

But Mr. Gephardt and the unions are right that globalization is as creatively destructive as the earlier versions of capitalism, which destroyed feudalism and Communism.

I must take exception with one statement in Specter's article: that Yeltsin "destroyed Communism in Russia."

At the Paris Peace Conference, he had made controversial statements about whether blacks should fight to destroy Communism when they were so oppressed in the United States.