THE STORY OF COMMUNISM IS ONE OF THE GREATEST tragedies in modern history. The movement grew, above all, out of horror at the terrible human toll of early capitalism. Out of that horror came hope for a better, more just future as well as a theory explaining how this future would arrive. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, capitalist systems in the world’s most highly industrialized states would not only grow corrupt and exhausted as they matured and expanded; they would also, as they forced more and more workers to sell their labor for a wage, create their own gravediggers: a proletariat capable of rising up and establishing a new social order.
In the decades after The Communist Manifesto appeared, a plethora of organizations—from electoral parties to workingmen’s leagues to secret societies and terrorist groups—took shape, committed to making the theory a reality. Modern socialist as well as communist movements trace their descent from them. In two successive workers’ internationals, as well as in newspapers, party meetings, universities, private homes, and a thousand grubby cafés, communists took part in fierce, chaotic debates about how to achieve their goals.
But the actual communist regimes that came into being in the 20th century violated the theory, silenced the debates, betrayed the hope, and never achieved the goals. Industrial workers did not seize power in the advanced capitalist states. Instead, in the most important cases, groups of ruthless militants seized power in heavily agrarian
