Marxist Theory and Socialist States

Just as the revolution in Russia and the growth of Communism in East Europe was a defining moment of the early 20th century, the downfall of Communism the Eastern Block countries was one of the seminal events that marked the latter half. Political scholars are prone to interpreting the fall to inherent weaknesses in the Communist model. They point to the rapidity of the fall and the immediate embracement of the Western model as a validation of their hypothesis. Recently, with the rising disillusionment with the Western model in the very countries that had so eagerly embraced Capitalism, the validity of the weakness-of-communism theory has begun to be re-evaluated. Alongside, the question has arisen if Capitalism is not the answer, what went wrong in the East European countries, that Communism did not succeed. Nilanjana Majumdar, in her first work, has taken an in-depth look at the functioning of some of the key East European countries and Russia. She has analysed the condition of these countries, as seen by scholars who have lived and worked in there. Dispassionately dissecting the strengths and weaknesses of the system, she discusses the situation in these countries vis-?-vis the traditional Marxist theory to shows how the circumstances in each country differed from each other, and how futile it is to try to find one single model that explains the failure of communism in these countries. She demonstrates that the critical failure of communist theory lay in its lack of any theoretical model of transition in forms of governance, which led to the collapse.