By a felicitous coincidence, this volume appears precisely ten years after the world shattering series of events widely known as the revolutions of 1989. During that year, what appeared to be an immutable, ostensibly inexpugnable system, collapsed with a breath-taking velocity. And this happened not because of external blows (although external pressure did matter), as in the case of Nazi Germany, but as a consequence of the development of insoluble inner tensions. The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for selfregeneration. After decades of flirting with the ideas of intrasystemic reforms, it had become clear that communism did not have resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, and even against the existing order.