ATPG despite myself being a firm believer in the welfare state, I'm with Vuk in that a communist country has never existed. And I don't mean 'pure' communism, as obviously there has been no 'purely' capitalist state either.

Those countries which Hawks like to call communist and tell us they have people hiding under our beds, those countries never got by the earlier stages of Marx's plan. Before you can become a functioning communist state/entity, you must go through the socialist stage. Contrary to the scare tactics employed by the west throughout the Cold War, communist is not an ideology of big government, in fact it is based on the idea of the withering away of the state. However, that is a gradual process, and first socialism is required to further the 'glorious revolution' and remove all burgeoisie property, placing power in the hands of the workers and finally building a more equal society at first. Obviously, to do such things you need a big government, and that is what all these so called 'communist' countries have had. So it would not really be appropriate to call them communist, since I think its fair enough to say none of them reached that stage. In fact, according to Marx most of 'communist' countries we think of were not even ready for socialism, they had barely had a bourgeoisie revolution to take power out of the old aristocracies, never mind the workers revolution after the process of industrialisation has taken place.

The clost thing the world has seen to communism has probably been various settler communities in the less strictly controlled parts of the New World. Places like Plymouth Colony worked on communist principles (obviously withouth the Marxist industrial overtones) because their circumstances meant that they already began with what the bourgeoisie/proletarian revolutions were meant to achieve, in removing all stolen labour (through feudalism/factory exploitation) and providing a base from which a communist society could be built up. And it worked, for a while at least. Ultimately they were absorbed into the mercantilist world, which was perhaps inevitable, not due to their own failure, but to overwhelming outside influence.