The only son of a famous astronomer, Guido Baracchi helped launch Australia's Communist Party and served, for a time, as its leading intellectual. The Sun dubbed him 'Melbourne's Lenin', while ASIO classified him 'a person of bad moral character and violent and unstable political views'.<BR>He battled Robert Menzies at university, worked as a professional revolutionary in Weimar Berlin, survived Stalin's Russia and went to gaol in Melbourne. He romanced - and broke the hearts of - beautiful, intelligent women, including the novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, the poet Lesbia Harford and the playwright Betty Roland.<BR>Stylish, wealthy, with a taste for literature and the arts, Guido Baracchi was never a typical fellow-traveller, and the Communist Party expelled him twice. But long after many more orthodox radicals gave up the struggle Guido continued to fight.<BR>For more than seventy years, romantics and rebels of all stripes saw in the Communist Party the best hope for a world remade. Here is also the story of those who dedicated themselves to that beautiful dream, their experience of its shimmering promise - and of its shattering collapse. This book rediscovers a fascinating life - and makes a provocative argument about the history and the future of politics in Australia.