What happened to communism?

I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my Moscow block of flats. It was about the size of a cow and made out of a gritty grey metal alloy which had, like almost everything in the USSR, never looked new or clean. Once, these objects had been all over the city. Now they were vanishing. Nobody else seemed especially interested in its departure, probably because there were — more excitingly — eggs on sale down the street. A few weeks later, I would watch the Soviet Army’s last Revolution Day parade trundle through Red Square. A few months after that I would see the litter bins of Moscow fill with burning Communist party membership cards, and the tearing down of many of the great idols of Marxism-Leninism from their plinths.

It was a time full of images, which produced many lovely symbolic photographs and films of the end of an entire historical period.