ABSTRACT
The concept of evolution, despite obvious limitations, offers insights into developmental processes within ruling communism and from communism. A new and evidently vigorous type of political system has rapidly collapsed, to be replaced eventually by multi-party democracy. A system whose central goal was the induced evolution towards a utopian society displayed limited capacity for adaptation to meet changing needs. Following the death of Stalin, modifications to the system permitted the evolution of different strains of communism, without changing the fundamental characteristics of the species. In the 1980s the system demonstrated its inability to adopt survival mechanisms in a society that presented challenges and pressures very different from those that suggested viability in the 1930s and later. After the collapse and near-extinction of communism in power, those societies enter a new stage in their political evolution, in which some ‘genetic material’ has been transferred, through political culture, from the communist regime.
