For a microscopic organism, Yersinia pestis has made an outsize mark on human history. It has felled some 200 million human beings since it first evolved, in addition to provoking political, economic, social, and cultural upheavals. This toll of death and devastation has earned the disease resulting from this bacterium the right to be called, simply, "The Plague." And though it certainly has a long history, this tiny killer also has a bright future.

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Plague has never really disappeared, but it suddenly seems poised for a comeback. Indeed, world health officials have quietly recategorized plague as a "re-emerging" disease in recent years, and it now infects 2,000 people annually, killing 200. The Chinese government even quarantined an entire town this summer after an outbreak of pneumonic plague, which eventually killed three and infected nine more. And experts fear the next stage of the disease will be especially dangerous, fueled by age-old phenomena, such as humans trying to use plague to wage war on their enemies, as well as new ones, such as climate change.

Welcome to the plague years, the next generation. For most people, plague automatically means the Black Death, which began in the 14th century and killed a quarter to a third of Europe's population, roughly 15 million to 25 million people. This is the best-known plague pandemic, but it wasn't the first. That honor goes to a sixth-century outbreak that originated in northern Africa and took out as many as 100 million people. Nor was the Black Death the last major pandemic. Plague spread through China and India during the 19th century, killing some 12 million people, and then spread to the United States in 1900, causing an epidemic in San Francisco.

Between major pandemics, the plague never completely disappeared. It never does: It merely retreats until conditions favor another outbreak. Plague "would be virtually impossible to eradicate," says Ken Gage, chief of the flea-borne diseases branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The reservoir is rodents, and it's very widespread." Indeed, Y. pestis is endemic in many populations of rats, mice, squirrels, marmots, gerbils, and other rodents. Fleas that feed on these infected animals can pass the disease along to humans. The unlucky recipients usually come down with flu-like symptoms, and death is often a torturous ordeal. All three forms of the disease -- bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, and septicemic plague -- can be easily cured with antibiotics, assuming it's caught early. When it isn't, the prognosis is poor, with a mortality rate of 50 to 100 percent.

Today, plague is endemic among the rodents of the American Southwest. Isolated outbreaks also occur regularly in East and Southern Africa, Vietnam, Burma, China, Mongolia, Russia, and Central Asia. What's more, there are already troubling signs that the disease is evolving into even more dangerous forms: Scientists recently discovered a drug-resistant strain of the plague in Madagascar.

A perfect storm of factors -- including population increases, urbanization, deforestation, changing land use, migration, and the growing ease of travel and trade -- are all playing a role in plague's re-emergence. So too, scientists think, is climate change. During the Black Death, the climate was warmer and wetter than usual, which "was very favorable for the plague system," says Nils Stenseth, a biologist and plague expert at the University of Oslo. Stenseth's research in modern Kazakhstan also revealed that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in the spring temperature, there's a whopping 60 percent increase in the incidence of plague among the gerbils that play host to Y. pestis. Earlier springs and increased precipitation would benefit the plague pathogen, which is particularly troubling because climate change is expected to have exactly these effects in many parts of the globe.

At the same time, climate change could dramatically alter the global distribution of plague, meaning that its past won't necessarily be the best guide to its future. Some regions could become too hot and dry for the fleas that transmit the disease, causing plague to fade away there while popping up in newly hospitable areas. In the United States, for instance, plague cases are currently centered in New Mexico, but climate change is expected to expand the range of the disease all the way up to Wyoming and Idaho.

And there are even more direct threats than climate change that could resurrect plague in a big way -- like bioterrorism. Plague warfare is almost as old as the plague itself. In the 14th century, the Tatars catapulted plague-ridden bodies into a town controlled by their Italian enemies. Russians employed a similar tactic when battling the Swedes four centuries later. And during World War II, the Japanese reportedly dropped plague-infected fleas from airplanes while flying over Chinese territory. Modern bioterrorists would probably be even more sophisticated, encapsulating the bacteria in droplets of liquid and spraying them into the air. (In fact, during the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union developed techniques to aerosolize plague.) In 1970, the WHO calculated that releasing 50 kg of plague in aerosol form over a city of 5 million could lead to 150,000 plague infections and 36,000 deaths.

And that's without genetic alterations to the pathogen, giving it resistance to antibiotics or making it live longer outside the host so it could spread through the air, which is exactly what some fear is coming next. For obvious reasons, information on whether particular terrorist groups or rogue states are actively working to weaponize plague is sparse to nonexistent. (But in 1995, a white supremacist in Ohio was arrested after illegally obtaining the plague bacteria by mail.) Nevertheless, experts remain convinced that plague is an appealing bioterrorist agent and caution that we should be prepared for its possible use.

Still, plague is unlikely to do as much damage in the modern world as it once did. The spread of plague can be interrupted pretty easily through simple steps such as wearing face masks and avoiding sick people. No large-scale quarantine is necessary.

That's a good thing, because plague will always be a looming threat. "If we're going to eradicate plague, we have to get rid of all the rodents," Stenseth says. "That's an impossible job. Plague will never, ever go away."

When Mikhail Gorbachev rose to become leader of the Soviet Union in March 1985, there was a fair amount of puzzlement about him in Washington. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had spotted him early, and U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz saw promise in him, but others, including then-CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert Gates, were more skeptical.

In the weeks before Gorbachev took power, Gates recalled in his memoir, he wrote a memo to one of the CIA's leading Soviet experts. "I don't much care for the way we are writing about Gorbachev," Gates wrote. "We are losing the thread of what toughness and skill brought him to where he is. This is not some Soviet Gary Hart or even Lee Iacocca. We have to give the policymakers a clearer view of the kind of person they may be facing." Gates said he thought that Gorbachev was the heir to Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief, and to Mikhail Suslov, the one-time orthodox ideology chief. Thus, Gates wrote in his memoir, Gorbachev "could not be all sweetness and light. These had been two of the hardest cases in recent Soviet history. They would not take a wimp under their wing."

The CIA devoted about 45 percent of its analytical manpower to the Soviet Union at the time, but real inside information about the new man in the Kremlin was scarce. Shultz said the intelligence was "thin," and Gates acknowledged "we were embarrassingly hungry for details" from the British and Canadians who had met Gorbachev on his visits, and others. Thus, the first CIA assessment of Gorbachev in June 1985 is an interesting milestone. This report, which I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request while researching my new book, suggests that Gorbachev's style was different, but there were doubts about the substance. "Gorbachev has moved to draw a sharp contrast in style to his recent predecessors, who treated the bureaucracy gingerly and approached change cautiously," the report observed. At home, he was rubbing elbows with workers, dressing down government ministers, and attacking chronic corruption and alcoholism. But in his foreign policy, the report noted, there was no "urgent agenda" to match the domestic activity. Although the paper captured well Gorbachev's early activism, it did not foresee the ambition for radical reform that would become clear in the years ahead.

In his forthcoming collection, Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, David King unearths otherwise lost Soviet images. From advertisements and political posters to photographs, and even mug shots, these works and images defined their time, evoking the drama of the communist era.

Lenin stands on the left side of the bottom step with comrades at a Marx Day rally in Moscow's Red Square in 1919. On a gramophone record, Lenin mercilessly lambasted the leaders of Karl Marx's First International and the Third International organizations, saying: "They betrayed the workers, prolonged the slaughter, became enemies of socialism, and went over to the side of the capitalists."

Leon Trotsky engages in intense discussion with his officers and men during the Russian Civil War.

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army celebrate victory over Baron Wrangel in the Crimea in 1920.

The full force of Lenin's fury is depicted by Ukrainian artist Adolf Strakhov on the cover of The Life of Lenin Is the Story of the RKP (Russian Communist Party) in Ukraine in November 1924.

Designers working for the "dynamo" forge and cast-iron foundry paint banners for a "5 in 4" mass demonstration in Moscow circa 1930. With the first five-year plan came a new direction in visual propaganda. Gone was the depiction of the revolutionary worker, solider, and peasant slaying the fat capitalist seen in the posters of the Civil War period, and gone was the productivist graphic and typographic design of the 1920s. The new approach was to show, often in montage and photomontage, images of skilled workers in the vanguard of Soviet agriculture and industry, their labor scrutinized from on high by an increasingly authoritarian leadership always demanding the plan be finished a year ahead of schedule.

"We Are Building a Fleet of Airships in the Name of Lenin" reads a 1931 poster by Georgii Kibardin with old-style Azeri text.

"The USSR Is the Center of International Socialism" reads one of a series of 20 posters designed by a group called Artists' Brigade and published in Moscow in 1933. The posters visualized in powerful photomontage graphics and slogans the major achievements and objectives of Stalin's plans for the rapid expansion of industry, the forced collectivization of agriculture, and propaganda on the political, educational, and cultural fronts.

Stalin is captured in this photograph by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Vlasik, the Soviet dictator's bodyguard. Vlasik's off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide.

Under the gaze of a portrait of himself, Stalin lays down the law on collectivization to his seemingly hypnotized comrades in Moscow on Dec. 4, 1935. Four of the participants were later crossed out of the photo after they were arrested and purged. Surviving in the photo are, from left: Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Shaduntz (party boss of Tajikistan), Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreyev, and Matvei Shkiryatov. Those whose faces have been crossed out are, from left: Boris Tal, Nikolai Yezhov, Mikhail Chernov, and Yakov Yakovlev.

In August 1936, Grigory Zinoviev was chief defendant at the first Moscow show trial (known as the Trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center), a trial Stalin conducted against his political enemies. Zinoviev was sentenced to death and executed later that month.

Murmansk, the Arctic sea port near the Russia border with Finland and Norway, and photographed above by Yevgeny Khaldei in December 1942, was used in the war as a landing base by American and British convoys supplying the Soviets with large quantities of military equipment. Murmansk had therefore been an obvious target for bombing, and on June 22, 1942, Hitler ordered its total destruction. In 24 hours of nonstop aggression, the Luftwaffe dropped 350,000 incendiary devices on the town's mainly wooden buildings, more than fulfilling the Führer's wishes.

"Thunderbolt," window poster No. 504 of TASS, the Soviet news agency, was hand-painted by the Kukryniksy, a famous Soviet trio of caricaturists. TASS window posters were used for propaganda displays.

Stalin, photographed by Dmitri Baltermants, lies in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow, where the show trials of his political enemies had been acted out in the 1930s.

Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin by David King comes out in September 2009 from Abrams Press. 

"Big oil," as Daniel Yergin notes, isn't what it used to be. Forget the "seven sisters" -- those huge companies that dominated the oil business in the 20th century. Today, at least 80 percent of oil reserves are in government hands, and three quarters of the 20 biggest oil companies are owned by states, many of them struggling to meet the needs of their populations.

With the global economic downturn walloping companies large and small, it's worth asking: What happens to all that state-owned oil? After all, national oil companies, those state-owned petroleum giants that just last year were enjoying $100-plus-a-barrel oil, aren't immune from the recession. Their revenues have slipped as oil prices tumbled. Today many of them are hurting, and the big question is whether they are equipped to invest in the downturn. Lack of investment in the lean years could provoke a price spike -- or worse, a supply shortfall -- when demand picks up.

Not all national oil companies are the same, however. Operating costs vary wildly between the easy-to-drill onshore fields in Saudi Arabia and the expensive ones lying deep, deep off the coast of Brazil. Access to finance is another crucial, though little understood, part of this picture.

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There are basically two types of national oil companies: those with ready access to capital and those without. In good times, the first group operates more like the publicly traded private oil companies -- like the Shells and ExxonMobils of the world. They sell the crude oil they produce and retain earnings after paying their government and shareholders the royalties, tax on profits, and dividends owed. This group includes Saudi Aramco, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Algeria's Sonatrach, China's CNOOC, Brazil's Petrobras, Malaysia's Petronas, and Angola's Sonangol. Many of them are able to finance their own projects from retained earnings, without resorting to loans or investors (as are most of the private oil majors).

In bad times such as the present, this system isn't free of trouble. These cash-rich national oil companies remain instruments of the state and can be forced to transfer more revenues to the government in times of falling oil prices and dwindling state coffers. They may also have to increase their contribution to national welfare programs. If they have been able to accumulate cash reserves in times of plenty, they will be more insulated from the market downturn. But if the government becomes too needy or too greedy, the companies have to turn to other financing vehicles, such as issuing bonds to outside investors to raise capital. Some national oil companies, such as Petrobras and Norway's StatoilHydro, are more protected from government needs and interference because they are partially listed on stock markets. They raise capital that way and also enjoy better access to loan and credit markets due to their higher standards of corporate governance and transparency.

But for national oil companies without ready access to capital, such as the National Iranian Oil Company, Mexico's Pemex, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, tough economic times can be much harder. They essentially function like government ministries and are susceptible to budget cuts. They sell the crude oil produced for the state and the revenues go straight to the treasury, while the companies receive back only their costs and sometimes a fee for each barrel sold. To pay for new drilling rigs and other capital expenditures, they must compete with other pressing government priorities, such as education and healthcare.

Over the years, these national oil companies have had to devise creative mechanisms to fund their most capital-intensive projects when oil prices fall. Some of them are financially adroit and have tapped into a variety of mechanisms to access finance independently from the state: loan markets, bonds, Islamic bonds, and oil futures, for example. Some have also set up foreign companies that generate revenue independently from national constraints. They have also turned to foreign investors and some $50 billion in oil-for-loan agreements with Chinese national oil companies. (The Chinese companies invest in those countries in exchange for a guaranteed future supply of oil from those projects.)

But the oil industry might be changing with these leaner times. As both types of state oil companies are forced to get more creative in finding ways to access capital, they will have to improve their standards of corporate governance and disclose more information on their operations. If they don't, outsiders will be less willing to invest, particularly in countries with perceived political risk, such as Nigeria and Venezuela. And that could mean less oil -- and higher price -- for everyone.

As oil prices skyrocketed in the last few years, many analysts pointed to booming demand in China and India. But they're only part of the picture. It's true that daily Chinese consumption surged from 4.8 million barrels per day in 2000 to 7.9 million barrels in 2008, while Indian demand rose from 2.1 to 3 million. Big fuel subsidies and rapidly expanding middle classes drove the jumps. Meanwhile, combined European and U.S. oil use declined slightly. The International Energy Agency predicts that China will account for more than 40 percent of the global rise in oil demand through 2030, while India will take up another 20 percent.

Fixating on Asia, though, misses two other critical factors. The first is the Middle East. Long seen strictly as a producer, it has in fact become a major consumer of oil. Middle Eastern countries will gobble up nearly 50 percent more oil than India in 2030, despite being home to just a fifth as many people.

The reason? Massive oil subsidies that put China and India to shame. Showering your citizens and companies with $20-a-barrel oil is easy when you can produce the stuff yourself for that much or even less. As a result, it will be far harder to persuade oil producers to part with their subsidies than it will be to convince the Chinese to do the same. That probably means less oil left for the rest of the world -- and higher prices to boot.

The other wild cards are wealthy countries, like the United States. They have few options to cut oil consumption quickly, but far more opportunity over the long haul. A 20 percent cut in oil consumption by the world's wealthy countries in 2030 would completely offset the expected increase in Chinese demand; a similar cut in U.S. gas guzzling would neutralize the expected Indian increase.