pIn the West, the general view is that the Communist/Socialist experiment failed totally, and has been expunged from history. I'm not sure that is the view in modern Russia. In multicultural Ulan-Ude, where Asian and European faces throng the shopping mall, the iconography of the Soviet experiment is commemorated in the heroic statuary, detail on buildings and the ubiquitous Red Star. It reaches it apotheosis with the massive bust of Vladimir Illyich Lenin, whose stony gaze surveys the passersby in Ploschad Sovetov. These icons are recognised as one of those things with made Russia what it is today. After all, the Communists may have closed the churches, but they did not destroy or obliterate them. They were kept as museums, comemorating a part of history that it was supposed the nation had moved beyond. The churches came back. Whese to say that Socialism cannot likewise return some day.