The End of the Communist Power Monopoly

This work analyzes the internal weaknesses and the external pressures that led to Communism's terminal crisis in Europe. It systematically links the history of Euro-Communism and the Prague Spring to the momentous events of 1989 to 1991. Michael Waller focuses on the essential elements of the Communist monopoly of power-autarky and the closed frontier, central command planning, the leading role of the party, and the psychology of democratic centralism. He reveals the internal weakness of the monopoly and traces the long process of a decline in which the Communist parties of both Eastern and Western Europe played an important part. The positions of the Italian Communist Party and of the Czechoslovak reformers of the Prague Spring are presented as nodal points in a process that could not culminate until the monopoly in the Soviet Union itself faltered, at which point the monopoly's characteristic mechanisms rendered its final collapse inevitable.