Today communism seems just a terrible memory, a nightmare as horrific as the Holocaust or the slaughter in the First World War. Was it only a decade ago that stone-faced men still presided over workers' paradises in the name of the people , while hundreds of millions endured grinding poverty and mind-controlling servitude? Or that the world seemed under threat from revolution backed by the threat of nuclear annihilation? In the 1970s, with the fall of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the march of Marxism-Leninism seemed irresistible. Two decades later the experiment had collapsed, leaving perhaps 100 million dead, and economic devastation spanning continents. Even China now embraces free market economics. Only in a few backwaters does communism endure, as obsolete as rust-belt industry. This book is a narrative history of that defining experience. It weighs up the balance sheet: why did communism occur largely in countries wrenched from feudalism or colonialism in the 20th century rather than - as Marx had predicted - in developed countries groaning under a parasitic middle class? Were coercion and state planning in fact the only way forward for backward countries? What was communism's appeal - not least among many intelligent observers in the West? Why did it grow so fast, and collapse so suddenly? Robert Harvey sets out the whole panorama of idealism, cruelty and suffering, and provides an intriguing analysis.