RUSSIAN ELECTIONS

The fact that a genuinely free national election has been held in the former Soviet Union mustn't pass without comment. Boris Yeltsin's landslide victory is welcome news for westerners who want to see a democratic course pursued in this, formerly among the most despotic of nations. With all the troubles attendant on moving from socialism to markets, from slavery to freedom and democracy, the rumored return to power of Communists is the big dog-that-didn't-bark story of 1996.

To really grasp the world-historical significance of free elections in this gigantic country, it is necessary to place them in context. Approximately 80 years ago, during World War I, the course of history took a tragic detour, away from the progress evident during the 19th century and toward the false gods of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism and later Maoism. All these horrific ideologies were explicitly atheist and materialist. All promised one form or another of earthly salvation through unbridled state power. Each form of totalitarianism crushed the individual, emphasizing the primacy of the collective and the state. In all its ghastly manifestations -- total wars against civilian populations, concentration camps, the Gulag, the persecution of believers and the suppression of the church, mass genocide on a previously unprecedented scale -- this totalitarian detour turned the 20th century into the bloodiest ever.

So much of this tragic history gained momentum in Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin, the abolition and seizure of private property, the rise of secret police with their execution chambers and all the horrifying apparatus of the first modern totalitarian state. Thus was the Communist enterprise launched on the world stage. As recently as the 1950s, 1960s and even 1970s, serious Western observers believed that international Communism had the momentum to prevail worldwide against the forces of Western freedom.

And then, within just a few years and the convergence of brilliant leaders Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, countervailing pressure was applied at a series of vulnerable points. The Solidarity labor movement arose in Poland. The Berlin Wall fell. And with it, the entire Soviet bloc soon came crashing down.

It is a great story, this triumph of freedom over the forces of atheistic international communism. In the dark days of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke eloquently of the choice faced by the Western Allies. They could lose to the totalitarians and see the world "take the first step into the abyss of a thousand years of darkness." Or they could summon the fortitude to prevail, and the world could yet climb into "broad, sunlit uplands" of freedom. Boris Yeltsin's smashing victory last week cemented further progress toward Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands."