In the case of the Communists, confidence in their own capacity to rule was evaporating so rapidly that the chances of clinging to power by force alone began to seem slim—and the benefits of doing so by no means clear. In the calculus of self-interest the balance of advantage to most Communist bureaucrats and party apparatchiks was rapidly swinging the other way—better to swim with the current than be washed away in a tidal wave of change.
