A comprehensive history of Communism from a global perspective, this is a somewhat more ideological counterpart to Oxford political historian Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism. Priestland’s work operates upon the premise that the events of 1989, ‘represented much more than the collapse of an empire: it was the end of a two-century-long epoch, in which first European, and then world politics was powerfully affected by a visionary conception of modern society.’ This book provides insights into the decline of the Communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc and USSR, and offers important historical perspective to any analysis of the post-Cold War world. See in particular Chapters 10–12 (Stasis, High Tide, and Twin Revolutions) as well as the Epilogue, which cover the period from 1968 to today.