Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history&#8217;s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded&#8211;and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies&#8211;East Germany, Romania, and Poland&#8211;to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class&#8211;communism&#8217;s establishment, or &#8220;uncivil society.&#8221; The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany&#8217;s pseudotechnocracy to Romania&#8217;s megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland&#8217;s cult of Mary to the Kremlin&#8217;s surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>