From the knowledge I have of Lenin he truely did want it to work and believed in it but ultimately it did fail.
In terms of human nature, if you were to ask a liberal thinker they would say that human nature isn't evil or selfish but we're all rational thinking people. Although, in my eyes, the rational position is to be evil and selfish. So, yeah.
So yes. To sum up. Good reasons why communism doesn't work. But I could have predicted that and saved them all this trouble. Getting to the MAIN point which was about the value of history. We didn't really need history to disprove communism, it was quite obviously going to fail.
EDIT - Yes, very cardy.