Not everything went according to plan in the state-socialist world. This much is well-known. The reasons, however, remain poorly understood. Invoking modernization's prophecy, some analysts contend that state socialism collapsed because economic development must eventually lead to political democracy. Others draw on liberal conceptions of human nature to argue that capitalism was bound to triumph, because people are too self-interested to sustain the practice of communist ideals; because dissidents, acting as the conscience of society, brought an unjust system to its knees; or because the demise of an unreformable system was inherent in its Leninist logic. From a Cold War perspective, some proclaim that the West's superior strength of arms and will prevailed. Even the great-man theory has made a comeback: either Gorbachev did it or, or as other commentators assert, Ronald Reagan vanquished the “evil empire.”

Revisionist accounts also surfaced. State socialism, say some, had nothing to do with true socialism, let alone communism. Others posit that state socialism was not an economic failure until the 1980s, when it became the victim of a world-market downturn. Some assert that in retrospect 1989 will mark socialism's rebirth in a truer form. The claims about economic performance are both fanciful and demonstrably wrong; on the latter, the foggy future must have the last word. Meanwhile, revisionism, like determinism, has little to tell us about the actual processes through which human agency brought down existing state socialism.