The collapse of communist power may well be seen by future historians as the most significant event of the late twentieth century.
In this book Holmes considers official corruption and campaigns against it, seeing these symptomatic of a legitimation crisis that developed following the failure of the economic reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. He analysises the nature of the accelerating legitimation crisis, and shows how it contributed to the wider social collapse.
Holmes argues against those who have seen these revolutions as proof of the crisis of modernity; their origins have to be related more specifically to the contradictions of communism itself.