Claudio Petruccioli, a leading Communist in late Cold War Italy, first published this political memoir in 2001 about the demise ten years earlier of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the creation of its successor, the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS). In a second edition appearing in 2020, he included a new introduction and concluding chapter to take account of recent developments on the post-Communist left. The book is being hailed in Italy as an outstanding history of the forces and personalities responsible for the left's failure to find a way forward after the end of the Cold War.
The original edition recounted how PCI leaders had reacted to events from the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the disintegration of Italy's Cold War political system in the watershed elections of 1994. The PCI, which at its founding in 1921 had taken its bearings from the Bolsheviks’ rise...