Two anniversaries we mark this year — the centenary of the Russian Revolution and the decade since the start of the global financial crisis — have more in common than is apparent at first sight.
今年我们将迎来的两个重要周年纪念——十月革命100周年、全球金融危机爆发10周年——比乍看上去有更多共同点。
Both events are self-evidently momentous. The October Revolution ushered in a dictatorship that would loom over the 20th century as one contestant for hegemony against fascism (in the first half) and democratic market liberalism (throughout). The global financial crisis, meanwhile, shook to its foundations the model that had emerged victorious from the cold war.
两大事件的重要性都不言而喻。十月革命催生了一个独裁政权，这个独裁政权是贯穿整个20世纪的主角之一——与法西斯主义（上半叶）和民主市场自由主义（整个20世纪）争夺霸权。而全球金融危机动摇了从冷战中胜出的自由主义模式的根基。
The stultifying communism that the Soviet bloc had evolved to by the 1980s collapsed under the weight of its own economic and political contradictions. The political turmoil of the last year demonstrates that we are now watching to see whether open market economies will suffer the same fate.
到上世纪80年代，苏联演化出的僵化迟钝的共产主义，在其自身重重经济、政治矛盾的重压下崩溃。去年上演的政治乱象证明，如今我们正在见证开放市场经济是否将遭遇同样的命运。
But the similarities run deeper than merely the historic scale of the two events. The content, too, of the current threat to democratic market liberalism is the same as that which felled its rival.
但两起事件的相似性不止于同样深远的历史意义。民主市场自由主义眼下面临的威胁，也与当年击倒其对手的威胁一样严峻。
Communism failed because it committed two types of lies. The first was to betray the dream that had originally attracted so many millions to it: a society of equality, solidarity and self-realisation through collective purpose. Belief in this dream lived on longer than could be justified even in communism’s heartland — and longer still in the west. It was eventually ground down by reality.
共产主义之所以失败，是因为它撒了两个谎。第一个谎是背叛了最初吸引无数人投身共产主义的梦想：一个建立在共同目标基础上，平等、团结、自我成就的社会。在共产主义的大本营，人们对这一梦想的信心即便在失去依据后还继续存在了一段时间，在西方则继续存在了更长时间。这种信心最终被现实碾碎。