Why did Communism end when it did?

Archie Brown discusses the contributions of historians to the understanding of Communism and why it failed.

Exactly a quarter of a century has passed since the start of a seven-year period that changed Europe dramatically and saw the end of the Cold War. It was on March 11th, 1985 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its leader. From that moment an increasingly radical reform process, perestroika, was launched.

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