Those who did not would fall away after the war with the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These events proved to every remaining communist who had eyes and ears that the worst they had heard, and more, was true. Everything that came out from Russia and the Eastern bloc – the stories that were so continuous and similar that they could only be dismissed by the most belligerent believer – showed that if communism had been a nightmare for the world, it had been a catastrophe for the people it had claimed to govern. By 1970 in his landmark work Ni Marx, Ni Jesus (Without Marx or Jesus), Jean-François Revel could say with confidence that ‘no one today, even within the communist parties of the western world, seriously contends that the Soviet Union is a revolutionary model for other countries’.10 If the true believers were falling away gradually, they disappeared almost to a man when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the world had confirmed for them what their own warning sirens had been trying to alert them to for years. The confirmation of what their own true believers had done in their effort to dream up the perfect system was scarcely to be believed. But the millions and millions of corpses, the wasted lives – living and dead – that communism left behind as testament to its main accomplishment, were enough to give any sane believer pause. There were some true believers left, like the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, but the world generally reacted to them with the incredulity deserved for a person standing on top of a pile of corpses promising that with just a few more deaths he could make the whole thing right.

Throughout the stages of its collapse, communism had not only revealed its own horrors, it also revealed the foolishness of several generations of people meant to be among the cleverest and most informed people in the continent. From the era of Marx right through to 1989 many of the cleverest people of the age contaminated themselves by their approval of the communist system. From George Bernard Shaw to Jean-Paul Sartre almost all the secular prophets turned out to have been apologists for the worst systems of their time.