Just What Has the Victor Won? : Cold War: Gorbachev’s Russia may struggle to look more like the America of its Lincolnesque or Rooseveltian dreams; George Bush’s America resembles more and more czarist Russia.

Crossing Poland with the first U.S. diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1933, a young American diplomat named George Kennan was somewhat astonished to hear their Soviet escort, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, reminisce about growing up in a village nearby, about the books he had read and his dreams as a small boy of being a librarian.

“We suddenly realized, or at least I did, that these people we were dealing with were human beings like ourselves,” Kennan wrote, “that they had been born somewhere, that they had their childhood ambitions as we had.”

It was a fleeting moment in the long ordeal of the two nations’ great rivalry. By postwar 1946-47, Kennan was to provide an already hardening American policy its permanent principle of “containment,” to confront “at every point” what was seen as the implacable expansion of the Kremlin.

If Kennan himself later fretted about the overzealous adoption, even abuse of his views, about his own “careless and indiscriminate language,” no one seemed to notice. A U.S. arsenal of 13 atomic bombs in 1947 grew ineluctably over the next four decades into thousands of nuclear warheads, a $300-billion military budget, a secret Pentagon “slush fund” bigger than national expenditures for transportation or food and nutrition.

It is a still half-hidden record worth pondering as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev careens through his end-of-century revolution in Soviet and world politics--a sweep of change like no other in history.

The Cold War is over and we have won, our politicians now tell us. But at what price, with what sort of victory?

It turns out that the “dent in the problem” came far less from anything Washington did--including a crushing arms race in which Moscow contorted itself to keep pace--than from what happened inside the Soviet Union itself. Ironically, it was something of the worst and the best of the Soviets’ poisoned experiment with Marxism that finally triggered the upheaval--in part the aftershock of their own military-political folly in Afghanistan, in part the irrepressible force of a vast nation sent to school as well as suppressed, educated in ancient ideals amid a too hypocritical reality.

That we did not see earlier and more clearly the inner politics of the revolt, the roiling within the Soviet elite that began as far back as the 1960s, was a major failure of U.S. intelligence and journalism and something of an emblem of our deeply vested interest in the old enemy, the old game.

The result, in any case, is going to be a far more complex, intricate world. A powerful new Europe and Asian rim, with their resurgent Germany and Japan, their erupting nationalisms just beneath the multinational surface, may challenge our statesmanship in ways that will make us envy George Kennan and his Cold Warriors. For the United States, the premium will be on precisely the kind of diplomacy and intelligence that has been most rare in the last 45 years--genuine knowledge and sensibility about foreign cultures without cant, reckonings of national interest before bureaucratic advantage.

Yet in the end, upheaval or no, the old, enduring problem of both the American and Russian revolutions will remain: How to nurture and sustain a free society? Here the cost and paradox of victory are most bitter. If we only are left standing in the ring, we are also equally alone among the wealthy developed societies in our relative failure of social responsibility, with so many in want, so many without adequate health care, education, security. The winner of the Cold War trails Botswana and Albania in inoculations of its children, has millions more homeless than when it broke the Berlin blockade, suffers as much of its population in poverty and despair as in 1947, ends the contest with the top 1% of its rich owning more of the national wealth than at any moment since 1917. Gorbachev’s Russia may struggle to look more like the America of its Lincolnesque or Rooseveltian dreams; George Bush’s America resembles more and more czarist Russia.

Glasnost has yet to come to a White House unwilling to face the undemocratic concentration of power in American life, the pervasive corruption of money in our politics, the loss of the ethical Cold War to greed. It may yet take another Soviet menace to turn the tide, the specter of a fundamentally wealthy, gifted Russia whose true might is freed by a democratic process, while keeping its most humane legacies. The crowds in Red Square and at the Berlin Wall are deploring totalitarianism, after all, not universal education, the right to health services, child care, reasonable rents, affordable culture, the absence of Donald Trump or Lee Atwater.

More severe than any foreign threat, the adversary in that confrontation would be our own ideals. At the close of the Cold War, as at the beginning, we are in danger of losing the peace.