Why all the fuss about 1989? Twenty years on, the idea of millions of people yearning for the humdrum joys of daily life in welfare capitalism no longer seems so startling or moving. Familiarity has dimmed the excitement of the freedoms won: to travel, to shop, to exchange currency, to change jobs, to move house, to think, to speak. Experience has scarred the belief that "Western" life is a self-correcting nirvana, where officials are efficient, politicians public-spirited and justice incorruptible. For about a third of the world's population, the fall of the wall is probably history, not real life.

The best way to appreciate the significance of 1989 is to remember what it was a revolution against. The new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic novel, "In the First Circle" (Harper Perennial, $18), captures better than any other work of fiction the quintessence of communist rule at its Stalinist peak: all-pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal.

By 1989 that system had become more rotten and less frightening, especially in the east European satellites of the evil empire. But the climate of fear and lies was still there, with political prisoners, murders, beatings and blackmail, especially in the grimmer places such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Eight hectic months in 1989 turned the winter so starkly described by Solzhenitsyn into spring.

The new edition of the novel differs subtly but importantly from the version published in English in 1968. That was based on a self-censored text that the author had prepared in the hope of getting it published in the Soviet Union. It left out the hero's espionage for America, the Christian faith of his friend and other details that the Soviet authorities would have found utterly intolerable. The longer text is deeper and darker.

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