In crafting this book, I was inspired by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, in which very short chapters heightened the drama and kept the reader moving along. My book has 43 chapters in addition to the introduction, and runs 318 pages, plus endnotes. You can do the math. The chapters are short and to the point, yet provide sufficient detail to make the case. As one colleague stated: “I have never seen China’s Cultural Revolution so well depicted in five pages!”If potential readers came upon this book in a bookstore—and the cover photo is bound to attract their attention—but wanted to get a sense as to what the book is about, they might best read the titles of all 43 chapters in the table of contents. And then, if still interested, they might read pp. 1-8 as orientation to what the book is—and is not. Or, if they want to get a feel for the situation on the ground, they might look at pp. 163-169 on the drama and causes of Sino-Soviet split. There they will see that the issue of nuclear weapons was the trigger for the schism that ensued. In 1957, at a closed meeting of leaders of communist parties from throughout the world, Mao and his associates scorned Khrushchev’s fear of nuclear war, leaving most participants in stunned silence. Indeed, and more broadly, I found that leaders of communist states displayed very different degrees of risk-acceptance in crises that threatened to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.How, then, did I come to write this book? I have had a long career as a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley (since 1971). My first publication was a co-authored book in the field of “comparative communist studies”; it appeared in 1970. Thereafter, I concentrated my research on Soviet and post-Soviet politics and foreign relations. But all along, I kept an eye on what was happening in other communist regimes.When the field of “comparative communism” hit its stride in the late-1960s, the time that China’s mystifying “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was ongoing, the concern was principally to understand the difference between Stalinism and post-Stalinism in the USSR and East Europe, the difference between the Soviet and Maoist models of rule, and the ability of “minor” economic reforms in European communism to provide material well-being and political stability. At the time, however, few people could anticipate the dramatic events to come in subsequent decades: rapprochement between the United States and China; Gorbachev’s radical political reforms that unraveled European communism; Deng Xiaoping’s radical economic reforms that unraveled Maoism and led eventually to China’s rise as an economic power; the United States’ military defeat in Vietnam; Vietnam’s and Laos’s emulation of China’s “Market Leninism”; the emergence of a family dynasty in a nuclearized North Korea; or the durability of Castro’s Cuban revolution.Now that we can look back on both the collapse of European communism and thirty years of the evolution of Asian and Cuban communism, I saw this as a good moment for providing a synthesis that addresses key questions of explanation, evaluation, and—in the cases of the five remaining communist states—speculation as to where they might be headed. Thirty years after the collapse of European communism, much is now clear about the origins and evolution of communist regimes in their many variants. Less clear, of course, is the ultimate fate of those regimes that remain.I have pitched this book to the educated reader, though specialists on the topic will hopefully recognize the novelty of my interpretations. I have avoided using jargon that might engage specialists in the social sciences while putting off the non-specialist. In all candor, my hope was that professors would assign this book to their undergraduate students in lecture courses on this topic. I pitched the narrative accordingly: insightful and nuanced, but accessible and engaging. I also hoped that the broader, educated public would appreciate an accessible book, of reasonable length, that made sense for them of the nature of communism.