Though communism’s corpses pile up much higher than fascism’s, people find it easy to imagine a decent communist, but not a decent Nazi. We cannot conceive of decency in one who embraced the doctrine of a master race. But we can understand someone who wished to create a world free of oppression, inequality and want. Indeed, this sympathy has made generations blind to the fantastic cruelties of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and (rather less) Fidel Castro.

The decency of communism’s ideals and the horror of its effects form the basis of Robert Service’s masterly handling of the beginning, progress and (all but) end of communism. Service sees the miseries and tyranny which communists fought against; and he allows credit where it is due, as when he writes of Castro’s regime that ”the poor of the island benefited most from the revolution. Blacks in particular were helped by government efforts to improve conditions.”

But who could fail to be appalled by the gross perversion by communists in power of the ideals which had assisted them into it? Service has no respect for Vladimir Lenin, the evil founding genius of the practice of communism. He notes, among other caustic asides, that the Russian leader’s famous criticism of Stalin for relying overmuch on ”administrative methods” was ”rank hypocrisy, coming from a leader who had plunged his country into a vat of dictatorship and terror”. Nor does he see Trotsky or Bukharin as good alternatives to the monstrosities of Stalinism: ”they shared the assumption that revolutions had to be defended by merciless measures.”

But this is not just a doleful list of persecutions and slaughter. It is also a finely tuned description of what life was like under communism - a life which became, in the later post-war period in the Soviet bloc, tolerable enough materially, even if stultifying. Service is also good on the sheer confusion of western radicals in the 1960s and 1970s - who ”liked mini-skirts, long hair and hallucinogenic drugs [yet] responded positively to Mao’s portentous platitudes”.

The paradox of idealists conniving in evil is as evident in Britain as anywhere. Its Communist Party, never significant electorally, was a faithful if never slavish follower of the Soviet Union - which secretly subsidised it, something which leading members of the Party professed to find shocking when it was revealed in the 1990s. Yet it also contained some of the leading working-class leaders of the pre- and post-war years.

Some of that is brought out in the insightful account given by Communists and British Society 1920-1991. It has nice touches, as a discussion of the party’s mixture of tolerance and Puritanism over sexual deviance (”we’ll have noon o’ that filth and roobish when we coom to power,” the Lancashire-born general secretary Harry Pollitt is said to have said when asked his view of homosexuality by Stephen Spender). But the book has little or nothing to say about later communism, and nothing about the Party’s last gasp, the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

The real genius of the end of communism was Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. Archie Brown has been his closest and best commentator. His aptly titled Seven Years That Changed the World is in part a reprint of an earlier work, but the first and last sections are new. While he gives some weight to criticisms of the last of the communists, his summing up shows why we are right to honour Gorbachev - as the man who allowed freedom of speech, released dissidents, opened borders, brought in competitive elections, nursed the growth of civil society and the rule of law, encouraged free intellectual inquiry, gave the Warsaw Pact countries freedom to leave and ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Few have done more in practical terms for human freedom - even, paradoxically, while he was much of the time convinced he was acting in the name of Lenin.

John Lloyd was the FT’s Moscow correspondent from 1991 to 1995.

Comrades: A World History of Communism

By Robert Service

Macmillan £25, 592 pages

FT bookshop price: £20

Communists and British Society 1920-1991: People of a Special Mould

By Kevin Morgan, Gideon Cohen and Andrew Flinn

Rivers Oram £14.95, 304 pages

FT bookshop price: £11.95

Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective

By Archie Brown

OUP £25, 370 pages

FT bookshop price: £11.95