The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century Book

Born in the 19th century as a theory, communism became a reality only in the 20th, when Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power in the October Revolution of 1917. In The Passing of an Illusion, the late French historian François Furet argues that Lenin had little idea that the revolution he set in motion in Russia would so swiftly spread to other countries. The October Revolution did spread, Furet continues, because it gave citizens of the European and Asian powers caught up in World War I the idea that war was neither necessary nor inevitable. Russia's example proved that a country at war could simply declare that enough was enough and walk away. That action, Furet says, "endowed the idea of revolution not so much with a doctrine as with a universal sense of peace rediscovered." For nations bled dry by four years of war, the promise of peace was irresistible. That promise, announced by a red banner, troubled the ruling classes of nations across the globe for the next seven decades.

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