It is true that Marxism today is in crisis; but it is not dead or irrelevant, as its opponents try to argue. This crisis is being explained primarily with reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of socialism to outwit capitalism as a world system. The present essay, however, tries to look at this question from a somewhat different angle. It tries to argue that the crisis of Marxism has to be primarily explained as an internal one. The end of the USSR has, of course, added a new dimension to it. To be more exact, the essay seeks to examine how the inner crisis of Marxism has been actually precipitated by the distortions it has suffered in the name of official or authentic interpretation and to explore new clues towards an alternative understanding of Marxism's revolutionary spirit at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is an irony of history that the development of Marxism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it had not yet attained any official status, took place in dark times, in the periods of worst reaction and counterrevolution, while the internal crisis of Marxism, which constituted its own dark hour, was contingent and avoidable and took shape in a period marked by the victory of socialist revolution in Russia.