"Today Global Communism seems just a terrible memory, an expressionist nightmare as horrific as Nazism and the Holocaust, or the slaughter in the First World War." "In the 1970s, with the fall of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the march of Marxism-Leninism across the world seemed irresistible. Less than two decades later the experiment had collapsed, leaving perhaps 100 million dead, as well as economic devastation spanning continents. Even now China increasingly embraces free market economics. Only in a few backwaters does communism endure, as obsolete as rust-belt industry." "This book is the first global narrative history of that defining human experience. It weighs up the balance sheet: why did communism occur largely in countries wrenched from feudalism or colonialism to twentieth-century modernism, rather than - as Marx had predicted - in developed countries groaning under the weight of a parasitic middle class? Were coercion and state planning in fact the only way forward for backward countries? What was the explanation for its appeal - not least among many highly intelligent observers in the West? Why did it grow so fast and collapse with such startling suddenness?" "A Short History of Communism sets out the whole epic story for the first time, a panorama of human idealism, cruelty, suffering, and courage, and provides a new analysis."--Jacket.