When communism was ushered into Czechoslovakia, it was supposed to last forever – yet over eleven days in November 1989, this supposedly eternal order collapsed. Why did it fall apart so easily?

This respected sociological essay, written in the pivotal years of 1989 and 1990, is now available for the first time in English. Ivo Možný tells the story of a despotic state expropriating the Czechoslovak family and subjugating the personal sphere in exchange for promises of a bright collective future, only for the regime to be vanquished forty years later by the very institution it had dispossessed. The essay explains the reasons for communism’s downfall, examining the private aspirations of whole swaths of nameless social actors that left hardly anyone interested in keeping the regime afloat.