A concise, readable, and novel interpretation of the history of
communist states. Sixteen states came to be ruled by communist
parties during the 20th century. One, the Soviet Union, was
geographically the largest nation in the world and a superpower.
Another, China, had the world's largest population. At communism's
high point, its adherents envisioned global triumph. Today,
however, only five communist regimes remain in power. Why? In The
Rise and Demise of World Communism, George Breslauer, a specialist
who has spent decades observing the evolution of communist states,
provides a sweeping history of the world communist movement,
focusing in particular on what communist states shared in common
and why they began to differ from each other over time. Throughout,
Breslauer explores the relations among communist states as well as
the relations between those states and the world of increasingly
affluent, and militarily formidable, democratic-capitalist powers.
He finds that these regimes all came to power in the context of
warfare or its aftermath, followed by the consolidation of power by
a revolutionary elite that valued "revolutionary violence" as the
preferred means to an end, based upon Marx's vision of apocalyptic
revolution and Lenin's conception of party organization. As
Breslauer shows, all these regimes went on to "build socialism"
according to a Stalinist template and were initially dedicated to
"anti-imperialist struggle" as members of a world communist
movement. But their common features gave way to diversity,
difference, and defiance after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
For many reasons, and in many ways, those differences soon blew
apart the world communist movement and eventually led to the
collapse of European communism. Even though a few communist regimes
still remain in power, the dream of world communism is dead. But
the future of the remaining communist regimes is uncertain. An
accessible history of one of the most important political phenomena
of the past 150 years, The Rise and Demise of World Communism
provides readers with a crisp account of the entire movement-from
the theories of Marx and Lenin to the on-the-ground policies of
Stalin, Mao, Gorbachev, Deng, and other communist leaders-that
culminates in our own era.
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