From the 1970s on there were strong signs of actual regression.What most reformers in the socialist world would have wanted was to transform communism into something like Western social democracy. Stockholm was their modelrather than Los Angeles; there is no sign that Hayek and Friedman had many secret admirers in Moscow or Budapest. It was their bad luck that the crisis of the communistsystems coincided with the crisis of golden age capitalism, which was also the crisis of socialdemocratic systems. It was their even worse luck that the sudden collapse of communism occurred when the root-and-branch radicalism of the pure free-market ideologists was (briefly) triumphant in the capitalist West. This therefore became the theoretical inspiration of post-communist regimes, though in practice it proved as unrealisable there asanywhere else.In many ways the crises in East and West ran parallel and were linked into a single global crisis by both politics and economics. But for the communist system, at least in the Soviet sphere, it was a matter of life and death which it did not survive. Survival of the economic system was never at issue in the developed countries of capitalism.During the 1930s, the end of capitalism had seemed near.

The Great Slump could be described, like the title of a contemporary book, as This Final Crisis. After 1973, few were seriously apocalyptic about the immediate future of developed capitalism.However, the social texture of Westernsocieties had been far more profoundly undermined than that of socialist ones, and consequently in this respect the crisis of the West was more severe. The social fabric of the USSR and Eastern Europe went to pieces as a result of the system's collapse and not as a precondition of it. Where comparisons were possible, as between West and East Germany, it seemed that the values and habits of traditional Germany had been better preserved under the lid of communism than in the Western region of economic miracles. The Jewish emigrants from the USSR to Israel revived the classical music scene there, since theycame from a country where going to live concerts was still a normal part of cultured behaviour. The concert public had not yet been reduced, in effect, to a small and mainly middle-aged or elderly minority. (In New York, the concert public for classical music was said in the early 1990s to rest on 20-30,000 people out of a population of 10m.) The inhabitants of Moscow and Warsaw were less worried by what troubled those of New York or London: a rising crime rate, public insecurity, and the unpredictable violence of anomic youths.How much of this difference between East and West was due to the greater wealth of Western societies and the far more rigid control of the state in the East is difficult to establish.

In some respects East and West had evolved in the same direction. In both, families became smaller, marriages broke up more freely than elsewhere, the populations of states - or, at any rate, of their more urbanised and industrialised regions - reproduced themselves barely if at all. In both, the hold of traditional Western religions was drastically weakened. Polish women became as reluctant to let the Catholic Church dictate their mating habits as Italian women. Plainly the communist regimes provided less social space for subcultures, countercultures and underworlds of all kinds, and repressed dissidence.

Moreover, peoples which had passed through periods of genuinely ruthless and wholesale terror were likely to keep their heads down even when the exercise of power became gentler. Nevertheless, the relative tranquillity of socialist life was not due to fear. The system insulated its citizens from the full impact of the Western social transformations because it insulated them from the full impact of Western capitalism. What change they underwent came through the state or through their response to the state. What the state did not set out to change stayed much as it had been before. The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.THE CRISIS decades affected the Third World in very different ways.