World in pre-revolutionary state: The winds of change blow ever stronger

All over the world, historians are dusting off a phrase that regularly has a sharp, if fleeting, relevance: Pre-revolutionary conditions. That the 30th anniversaries of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and of the communism of the Soviet Union are at hand offers a cyclical validity to their unearthing.

Some of the historians, the kind that might have been approached during their undergraduate years by KGB recruiters, may struggle to suppress a gleeful I-told-you-so. The evidence ranges from the specific to the general, but there seems an accelerating momentum towards a traumatic known unknown.