El Pasado de Una Ilusion

This sweeping, utterly essential history traces the rise of state communism through such exemplars as Stalin and Mao Zedong, charts its degradation in the dictatorship not of the proletariat but of powerful individuals, and documents the last gasps of the doctrine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Furet ends by remarking on a strange irony, a logical outcome of communism that Lenin and his contemporaries would have feared to foresee: with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, "class warfare, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism have given way to the very things they were supposed to replace--bourgeois proprietorship, the liberal democratic state, individual rights, free enterprise. All that remains of the regimes of October is what they sought to destroy." --Gregory McNamee