This book charts the demise of east European communism and analyses the failure of the communist experiment, the revolutionary events of 1989 and the post-communist aftermath as the legacy of both these processes. The author explains communism's initial ability to survive crises but then its cumulative decline in the face of dissidence, economic weakness and reform movements. By analysing these issues in the context of the regions drive since the nineteenth-century to catch up with western Europe, this book concludes that the events of 1989 can cast light more widely still, on the fortunes of the three great ideas that the continent as a whole derived from revolutionary France: liberalism, socialism and nationalism.