The latter make me post something that is not debating what you wrote, but something I left off this diary because it was long enough already.

Sometimes 1956 is lauded as such, I don't think one could say in general that 1956 was 'the end of communism', or 'the end of belief in communism', or 'the end of Western symphaty for the Bolshevik experiment', or some other variant.

• For some people, already the infighting in the last decades of the 19th century did it.
  
• For others, the emergence of the Bolsheviks in opposition in Russia.
  
• For still others, the way they took power.
  
• For more, how they conducted the civil war (Red Terror and all).
  
• For some idealists, the New Economic Policy of the twentiers.
  
• For many, Stalinism.
  
• For a lot of Central Europeans, the conduct of occupation and the Soviet-inspired takeovers.
  
• For some, the crushing of the 1953 East German protests.
  
• For many, Hungary 1956 [as you afew write, this was the event for your generation of Western new leftists].
  
• For many, Chinese excesses from Great Leap Forward to Cultural Revolution.
  
• For many, Prague 1968.
  
• For some, it took until Poland 1980/81.
  
• For others, it even took until Tienanmen, and the Velvet Revolutions.