The End of Communism Let's go back to what you were seeing and hearing in the 1980s as you toured Central Europe and moved away from your original plans of scholarship. It would take a long time to answer, but I think the simplest nutshell answer is human nature. The trouble with communism was that its anthropology was wrong.
People are neither as good as that nor as bad as that.
Beyond that, there are a number of answers. I'm sure that the main answers are to be found in the nature of communism itself and in the success of the West. One of the great historic changes in Europe after 1945 is the way in which Germany, which in 1945 had been the synonym for horror and terror, became, by the 1980s, a model and almost a synonym for the good things of a normal, civilized Western European existence. It is very surprising to me that more than half of those who turn out to vote in the Polish presidential elections will choose a post-communist former apparatchik over the great symbol of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, for all Walesa's mistakes. That's a surprise.