EUROPE - Brussels might learn from Russia's disastrous experiment in top-down political rule. When great empires and political systems fail, they tend to do so at frightening speed. Thus it was with the Soviet Union, which in the early 1970s was at its apogee, a global superpower which some commentators still expected to surpass and even render irrelevant its supposedly degenerate Western counterparts. But less than twenty years later, it was gone, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, King of Kings, a mere ruin amid the desert sands. Its epitaph might read the same: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”