LONDON -- It's 10 years this month since the failed Communist coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev marked the effective end of the old Soviet Union. The predictable rash of articles lamenting its loss has started showing up on editorial pages, written mostly by the usual suspects. How awful it is there now. Maybe the standard of living in the "motherland of socialism" was low, but at least it was reliable. Russian democracy is a sham, and its capitalism only serves the rich. So it's time to say it again: the Soviet Union deserved to die.

It deserved to die even though it put the first man into space, guaranteed all of its citizens enough to eat (albeit often only sausages and cabbage) and kept the worst kinds of thuggery under control (more or less) by recruiting the biggest bullies into the party. The miseries that have followed the Soviet Union's fall have more to do with the nature of the old Communist system than with the nature of market capitalism.

There are as many excuses for communist regimes as there are naive outsiders who want to believe in heaven on earth and cynical insiders who want to hang on to power. A prize example was Chinese President Jiang Zemin's warning to journalists from the New York Times: "Should China apply the parliamentary democracy of the Western world, the only result will be that 1.2 billion Chinese people will not have enough food to eat. The result will be great chaos, and should that happen, it will not be conducive to world peace and stability."