I’ve written before about my admiration for Fred Weir, Moscow correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. A third-generation Canadian Communist Party legatee, Weir is a modern-day John Reed in reverse. Having gone to the USSR in the 1980s to see what perestroika was all about, he married a Russian-Armenian woman and settled down in Moscow to raise a family. His 1997 book, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, with David Kotz, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, remains a reliable guide, as valuable as it is expensive, to much of what was happening to Russian’s power…