A Brief History of Communism: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire

This book is the story of the men who believed they knew how to create an ideal world, and in its name did not hesitate to sacrifice millions of innocent lives.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1917, it is important to understand how a small band of Communists was able to take over a country of 150 million, and how, seventy-four years later, the huge Soviet Empire they had created, was exploded by three inebriated men.

The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has said that the demise of the Soviet Empire in 1991 was the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. This book aims to show that the greatest tragedy of the century was the creation of this Empire in 1917.

The book is written in conversational language by Anatole Konstantin, the author of A Red Boyhood, Growing up under Stalin, in which he describes his own experience of life in a Communist country.

Anatole Konstantin grew up in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union ruled by Stalin. In 1938, when Anatole was ten years old, his father was arrested by the KGB and the family never heard about him until fifty years later when Gorbachev came to power and they received a letter from the KGB saying that he had been executed and was now being posthumously rehabilitated. This was an admission that he had been innocent. Upon his father's arrest, the family became "enemies of the people" and barely survived. In 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Anatole with his mother and little brother escaped several days before the Germans occupied their town and they became refugees in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. In spite of misery and near starvation, Anatole managed to go to school, and when WW II ended, the family escaped to Poland and then to West Germany where he became a student at the Technical University of Munich. When he graduated as a Mechanical Engineer, the United States was admitting 200,000 Displaced Persons and he came to the land of his dreams. After having worked for twenty years in several companies, Anatole started an engineering consulting company which later became the PDC International Corp. that manufactures packaging machinery. His book, A RED BOYHOOD - Growing Up Under Stalin, describes life under Communist dictatorship and his escape from it. He also taught a course on The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire at the Lifetime Learners Institute at the Norwalk Community College.