The collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe in 1989 and of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 was widely assumed to mark the end of the historical career of communist systems and movements; it was also expected to discredit durably the ideas that animated them. The remaining incarnations of "scientific socialism"--notably the grotesque North Korean dictatorship and the bankrupt patrimony of Fidel Castro--were hardly inspiring models of a "socialism with a human face" for Western idealists and sympathizers.
The fall of communist states has been accompanied by a growing amnesia about the human toll exacted by the attempts to implement socialist ideals in the not-so-distant past, coupled with a revival of anti-capitalist sentiments generated by the problematic results of globalization, stimulating a new susceptibility to socialist ideals.
Needless to say, no similar attempts have been made to downplay or reinterpret non-judgmentally other major historical atrocities, including, in more recent times, the mass murders carried out by Nazi Germany. Academics today are not attempting to parse the populist elements of Nazism from its genocidal practices in the way ideologues cull communism's egalitarian message from its sordid applications.
