Introduction to Volume III

This third and final volume of The Cambridge History of Communism spans the period from the 1960s to the present. It is a period dominated by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and beyond, the demise of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of China as a global power, and the emergence of a new post-Cold War era of global interdependence, competition and conflict. It also displays, however, certain surprising continuities with the past. Communism, declared dead twenty-five years ago, has left many legacies in the geopolitical, political, social and cultural spheres, which still inform both individual and collective identities all over the world and continue to shape the faultlines in an ever more integrated world. And yet, compared to the 1960s - when communist parties held power in half of Eurasia, communists were important players in Africa and Latin America, and communism was a feared spectre in the Western world - one hundred years after the Russian Revolution, communism is represented on the political stage only by the state capitalism of a nominally communist China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, an isolated authoritarian regime in North Korea, a number of backward-looking former ruling parties in Eastern Europe and Russia, and fragmented relics of communist parties elsewhere. In the new millennium, the communist project seems a thing of the past, while its old adversary, nationalism, is thriving under conditions of uncertainty and dissatisfaction with capitalism. Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the demise of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s as “the end of history.” While history clearly has marched ahead steadily ever since, there is no doubt that an epoch did come to an end. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that things were “ending” long before the eventful years of the late 1980s, even predating the timeframe of our volume. And while few predicted the spectacularly swift demise of communist reality that took place within only a few years, many, including some communist officials and intellectuals, had long recognized the enormous challenges faced by communism and its multiple failings in all sectors of life throughout the postwar period.