Smith is not at his best while recounting recent Soviet history--anyone can do that, and some are even more qualified, like Bill Keller, who holds Smith's old position as the Times' Moscow bureau chief and who, more importantly, has lived in the Soviet Union rather than Washington as perestroika has grown up.

Smith is much stronger as a raconteur, depicting the grief of a widow in Nagorno-Karabakh whose son was axed in half by marauding Azerbaijanis, or the fear of a Ukrainian farmer whose state subsidies are in doubt, or the shock of a lifetime apparatchik who faces opposition for the first time in his political career for his seat in the Soviet Parliament.

He is also accomplished as a compiler of Russian jokes, which differ from Western humor by being much drier and often rather clunky, but are always pregnant with political satire.

One such example: a worker leaves the factory one day with a wheelbarrow covered with a cloth. The guard looks under the cloth, finds nothing there, and waves him on. The same procedure repeats for three days, when finally the guard asks the employee: "Look comrade, you must be stealing something. What is it?"

"Wheelbarrows," responds the worker.

In another anecdote, one Soviet is explainingthe meaning of perestroika to another. Hehas two pails, one full of potatoes and the otherempty. Then he transfers the potatoes into theempty pail.

"But you haven't done anything," objects thefirst.

"Yes," he responds, "but just think how muchnoise it makes."

Despite their penchant for satire, mostSoviets would deny that there's anything funny atall about communism. After all, the putatively"classless society" in practice means equality ofpoverty. It also means an obscene level of wealthfor the political elite, who enjoy summerdachas on the Crimea and special lanes onthe highways for their sleek Volga limosines whilethe rest of the population is holed away in huge,ghastly impersonal building complexes, one or tworooms to a family.

That's not funny.

Neither is the command economy, the polaropposite (if there is such a thing) of the marketeconomy. Here production is God and the consumeris meaningless. Success is measured in raw output:pairs of shoes, tons of lumber, stacks of bricks.

To demonstrate the foolishness of the system,Smith recounts the monumental inefficiency of theSoviet trucking industry. Since transportation ismeasured in kilogram-miles, Soviet truckers preferto lug heavy cargoes of lumber halfway across thecountry, rather than trying to minimizetransportation costs.

In the Soviet economy, three millionbureaucrats fill reams of paper each year settingquotas for everything from nails to oil to lumberto televisions, 200,000 items in all. Factoriesproduce goods not because anyone wants theirproduct, but because Gosplan, the state agencyresponsible for such nonsense, tells them to doso.

This Alice in Wonderland economy extends to theindividual level as well. Why should Sergei workharder if he isn't rewarded for additional output?And even if he were rewarded by merit, he can'tbuy anything worth having with his money, sinceMoscow bureaucrats, not he and other Soviets, setthe demand for goods. And even if he could somehowget what he wants, it would be of only the lowestquality, since quantity and not quality isrewarded by Gosplan. Soviet televisions, forexample, are prone to explode.

That's not funny.