On Christmas Day, thirty years ago, a fabulous present was given to the people of Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics declared: “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the USSR.” He announced that the office he had held was now extinct. Communist Party control came to an end.

Here in Britain and elsewhere in the West, pretty much everyone was delighted. The Cold War was over. We looked forward to welcoming Russia and Central and Eastern Europe into an expanded and strengthened community of free democracies.

But it has not worked out quite as we hoped in those exciting days. Some countries which overthrew communist regimes have become truly democratic but others have certainly not. Corruption remains rife in several countries. Some governments are authoritarian and, in the case of Belarus, brutally so. Russia is led by a former KGB officer who sadly clings onto the outdated and unwelcome concept of empire-building.

It is disappointing. It is also disappointing, back here in Britain, that we see some continued affection for the idea of Communism. And yet, amidst the disappointment, let’s not forget that Russia, the place where the Communist Party first emerged victorious and gained power, deliberately and knowingly gave it all up. Why did Russia do that? Why did the rest of Eastern and Central Europe do the same? What was wrong with  Communist rule?

I thought a lot about that last question in 1982 when the Communists were still very much in power. I travelled by train from Peking across Russia to Moscow, on down to Romania and Yugoslavia. I stopped for a day or two in Irkutsk, one of the biggest cities in Siberia. It had taken several days to get there and there was no fresh fruit on the train. In fact the menu in the restaurant car was almost wholly fictional. Most of the things listed were not available. So when I got to Irkutsk, I walked around the city with one purpose in mind: to buy some fresh fruit. After a long search, I finally found a shop that had some. But the fruit it had consisted of precisely two, small, stale lemons. Now that sounds like a really small issue. Surely a great political movement does not fail on something as trivial as that? Or does it?

That sort of thing was repeated extensively across the whole of the nation and in the neighbouring countries, too. It extended to every kind of product that people like to buy, but food was the worst. I know Russians who still remember getting up at the crack of dawn to queue for bread. In Poland there were ration tokens for basic foods. In Romania, too. And Bulgaria. 

The wholesale economic failure of Communism was not the only factor that brought it down, but it gave the system a hefty shove. The Solidarity movement in Poland  – a key link in the chain of events which brought down communism – did not mount a frontal attack on communism as a political philosophy. No. Instead it pointed out that the workers had been told by the Communist Party that they would prosper under its rule. Solidarity objected to the failure of the regime to deliver what it had promised. Improvement was demanded but the state-dominated economy was incapable of doing better

The emperor had no clothes. People knew, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, that the communist utopia had failed to arrive after 70 years of trying. People were living double lives. They said the approved things in public but knew, deep down, that it was all a lie. 

Some might say that people revolted against the repression under communism. Certainly intellectuals hated it. They could be arrested for saying anything against the Communist Party and have their careers destroyed. I have spoken to people who were horribly tortured for being dissidents. But I don’t think repression led to the fall of Communism. On the contrary, it kept it in power far longer than it otherwise would have lasted.

Thirty years on, the post-communist countries are certainly imperfect but life in most of them is vastly better than it was. Go to Warsaw, Budapest, Tallinn or many other places in the former communist empire and you find an amazingly higher standard of living as well as more freedom to speak, travel, change jobs or whatever. There is no rationing anymore. In fact, on the internet I see there is now an abundantly stocked fruit market in Irkutsk. There have been disappointments but the fall of communism in Europe was an historic event. It is still something to be celebrated – still an advance for mankind.

James Bartholomew is the director of the Museum of Communist Terror