Sean McKeekin: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. New York: Basic Books, 2023.

 

By the early 1990s, many assumed that communism had gone away. The Soviet empire had collapsed; Russia itself seemed well on the way to regime change; the ‘People’s Republic’ of China appeared to be moving toward becoming an actual republic ruled by the people. Commercial republicanism/liberal democracy stood firm. But by the 2020s, “liberal democracy seems bereft of energy, if not moribund, while Chinese Communism rapidly assimilates much of the world.” “How did this happen, and why did no one see it coming?”

The “why” isn’t hard to see. The optimists were deluded by their own wishful thinking, aided by Chinese deception. Within the republican regimes themselves, the Left shifted away from the standard appeals to ‘justice for the working man’ toward cultural-Marxist calls for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’—a shape-shifting that caught their opponents off-guard. The “how” is more interesting.

“Much as we like to imagine that Communism failed because of a cascading groundswell of heroic popular opposition from below, it was actually the disappearance of coercion from above that counted,” since “more than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control.” Communism had advanced only through disasters—World War I, the Great Depression, World War II—which had weakened its enemies, changing the relative power equation between Communists and their enemies. “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism,” to cite the first example of a successful Communist regime change, “was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered an immutable law of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation war to seize power by force—if the devastation was severe enough, and if they armed enough fanatics and foot soldiers to prevail over their opponents.” The supply of fanatics and foot soldiers renews itself with every generation, as a certain number of youths engage in their own characteristic form of wishful thinking, “dream[ing] of brotherhood between men, of equal rights for women or for racial or ethnic minorities, or, in the current jargon, of ‘social justice.'”

Although communism as an ideal is espoused in Plato’s Republic (albeit without social equality and likely with Socratic irony), and Christianity upheld equality of believers before God, and although Rousseau’s Social Contract, distorted, had inspired Robespierre and the Terror, it was Rousseau’s contemporary, a tax official and teacher named Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, whose Code of Nature convinced an erstwhile land surveyor and political scribbler, François-Noël Babeuf to publish a newspaper, Le Tribun du Peuple, in which he defended the late Robespierre as a “sincere patriot” and founded a still more radical organization, the “Conspiracy of Equals.” These egalitarians attempted to turn soldiers, former soldiers, and police against the regime of the Directory. Babeuf eschewed utopianism, rejecting any “assumption…that a government could be overthrown, that property could be seized and redistributed, without ruthless organization and cleansing revolutionary violence.” He and his close associates were arrested and guillotined by the Directory regime in 1797; Napoleon went on to suppress France’s “last revolutionary embers” during and immediately after his 1799 coup d’état. Utopian socialists, and utopians only, were tolerated for the next several decades, with such men as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier enjoying some popularity; it was Henri Leroux, a Saint-Simonian, who coined the word socialisme. “While its meaning was somewhat vague at first, during the years of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) ‘socialism’ caught on among radicals hoping the next revolution would bring about more equal social conditions.” It was during this regime when Pierre Proudhon asserted that property is theft. (A decade later, the liberal Fredéric Bastiat, would reply that the income tax was theft, and the struggle among the ideologues was on.)

Karl Marx would be far more consequential than any of these. Marx rejected natural right altogether, having been decisively shaped by Hegel’s historicism. Marx took Hegel’s “eschatological ‘dialectic,'” whereby the course of events was taken to advance toward ever-increasing human ‘consciousness’—seen concretely in the conquest of nature, the reshaping of nature for human purposes—via a set of conflicts—conflicts of ideas, sentiments, nations—and made it entirely materialistic. Hence Marxian ‘dialectical materialism’: neither materialism nor historical dialectic (much less dialectic itself) were new, but their combination was. As early as 1845, Marx wrote, famously, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It is of course arguable that any number of previous philosophers had indeed both interpreted and changed the world, indeed that the very existence of philosophy had changed the world, but Marx means that there should no longer be any sharp distinction between theory and practice—that thinking, being only an operation of the brain within a given set of economic and social circumstances, itself fully participated in ongoing material changes, functioning at most as clarifying spur to advance history’s dialectic. 

The way forward, he claimed was to form “a social class that did not even exist”—a class, in Marx’s words, “in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes,” one that would make war not on this or that social wrong but on “wrong in general.” This class, the “proletariat,” will demand “the negation of private property” and thereby effect “the dissolution of the existing social order,” which Marx called “capitalism.” In this project, he continued, “Philosophy is the head,” while “the proletariat is its heart.” While the actual industrial and agricultural workers of his time wanted reforms, not revolution, Marx pressed on, writing that the working class will someday “substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so called.” That this “total revolution” will require violence—doing and dying, “bloody struggle or extinction”—a dialectic of force—became clear in his Communist Manifesto, published a year before the European-wide revolution of 1848; “the timing of its release was exquisite.” But although the French monarchy was indeed overthrown, the Second Republic didn’t last long; Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had won its presidency and then staged a coup d’état three years later, renaming himself Napoleon III, head of the Second Empire. Marx and his friend-collaborator Friedrich Engels fled Paris for London, where enemies of the French tended to be welcomed, or at least tolerated. When his efforts to sustain a “Communist League” failed, he “return[ed] to his true métier, which was not politics as such but political writing.” The result was Capital.

In that tome, Marx claimed that the complexity of modern political economies, in which barter had been replaced by industrial production by wage laborers, had caused the “alienation” of workers from the products they made; the man on the assembly line might never see the ‘end product’ of his work; further, the industrialists’ policy of breaking labor down into its simplest components, which could be performed by machines, women, and children, lowered the wages they needed to pay the men, “immiserating” them as individuals and the workers as a class. “Marxist economics are a zero-sum game. Growth brings only ever more alienated and impoverished workers.” Industrialists are financed by bankers, who provide them with “capital.” Capital moves easily across political borders; it is international. Capitalism and its ruinous treatment of workers “will engulf the whole earth.” But, thanks to the dialectic of history, this circumstance will enrage the workers, sharpen their “consciousness” of their dilemma, while simultaneously increasing their numbers. “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument,” Marx writes. “The integument is burst asunder,” as “the knell of private property sounds” and “the expropriators are expropriated.” McKeekin remarks that Marx’s thesis “was completely demolished by developments [in Britain] over the next few decades,” but (paradoxically, given his materialism) “his moral critique of the unequal returns to capital was and remains plausible enough to sympathetic readers.”

Marx returned to political organizing in the 1860s, now with more success. In his “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” he stressed the importance of “foreign policy” in the proletarian struggle, the “bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries.” And indeed branches of his organization were founded in several European countries, with the French chapter quickly becoming the largest. Marx remained, as he put it, “in fact the head of the whole business.” Although such organizing was useful as preparation for action, it wasn’t legislation or strikes that proved to be “the critical event in the history” of the First International, but the Franco-Prussian War, which ended French domination on the continent and ended the Second Empire. The Paris Commune, a socialist if not Marxist affair, briefly took control of the capital, with Marx calling it “a new point of departure of world historical importance,” although the newly inaugurated forces of the Third Republic quickly crushed the Communards. Marx turned the repression to rhetorical advantage, averring that it had exposed the “undistinguished savagery and lawless revenge” behind the bourgeoisie’s supposed “civilization and justice.” “The very attacks on the Paris Commune, to Marx’s dialectical mind, proved its worth,” as it had proven that Communism could come to power. “Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilized world,” to be “forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new societies,” it “martyrs enshrined in the great heart of the working class.” “In fact”: scientific socialism. “Martyrs”: very much like the early Christian Church, minus God. The head and the heart, the Marxist philosophy and proletarian sentiment, combined.

Factions existed within the International itself. The Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, led the most influential one that opposed Marx. Marx’s continued residence in London began “to seem suspect to more hardened revolutionaries facing arrest and prosecution on the Continent.” He responded to the dissenters by imposing “a more rigid and centralized administrative structure,” itself a move sure to antagonize the anarchists still further. Anarchism being resistant to organization of any sort, Marx had the edge. Bakunin was expelled, his followers denigrated as sectarians. Marx “won the day” within the International, although Bakunin intensified his polemical assaults, condemning “the stale and lifeless Germanic quality of Marxism,” which, he predicted will “serve as obedient and even willing agents of the inhumane and illiberal measures prescribed by their governments.” Marxists, he rightly noted, are “the most impassioned friends of state power.” In coming to rule they will only dominate “yet another proletariat” with a “new rule” under a “new state.” As soon as the workers rule, they will no longer be workers; “anyone who doubts this is not at all familiar with human nature.” That, of course, is the nerve of the dilemma: Marxists deny the existence of a stable human nature, claiming instead that what is called human nature is malleable, capable of radical reformation if social and economic conditions are radically reformed. Bakunin went on to say that the actual rulers under Communism so-called quite possibly would not be workers at all but the “scientific socialists” or “philosophers”—men like Marx himself, “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world” who will, as Marx has shown in his rule of the International, “concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision,” a “new privileged scientific and political ruling class,” “concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific production.” Yes, Marxists intend to overthrow “existing governments and regimes,” but only “so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins.” By the 1870s, Marx disbanded his organization, recognizing that the time wasn’t conducive to revolution, that capitalism had years more to run. He rightly calculated that, like the Paris Commune, the First International would eventually be judged “heroic failures,” “legends to inspire future generations” of socialists. But then again, Bakunin’s predictions about the character of future Communist regimes also ‘came true.’

“To Marx, it was more important that the doctrine was sound than that the organization outlive him.” When German socialists formed the German Social Democratic Party, producing the Gotha Program (named after their founding congress at Gotha, Thuringia in 1875), Marx went on the attack. His Critique of the Gotha Program excoriated the democratic socialists for their “pernicious and demoralizing” bows to liberalism, including parliamentarism. On the contrary, the “period of revolutionary transformation” must consist of “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” with no serious alliances with bourgeois elements, compromises typical of parliamentary log-rolling. When the SPD won nearly twenty percent of the vote in the 1890 election, making it the top vote-getter, Marx gave up on the Germans and began to focus on Russia, just before the radical members of that party, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, dedicated Marxists, turned the party away from the Gotha Program and toward “Marxist orthodoxy” in the Erfurt Program of 1891, which “was based on the Verelendung (immiseration) thesis of ever-deepening inequality and class conflict.” Practically, this meant a turn from efforts to improve working conditions for proletarians in Germany to use the “size and prestige” of the SPD “to set the ideological agenda for the international socialist movement.” In France, for example, Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue teamed with another Marxist, Jules Guesde, top form the French Workers’ Party, which was similarly internationalist. “The very idea of international coordination of doctrine ran against the needs of nationally or regionally focused reform movements, which must, after all, be particular to their local circumstances,” but this amounted to small potatoes to the real Marxist, who formed the Second International at a congress in Paris in 1889. 

Factionalism again hobbled the movement. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein, “the closest intellectual heir of Marx and Engels,” who had co-written the Erfurt Program with Engels, began to deviate from the master’s doctrine precisely because, in attempting to be a good scientific socialist, he saw that the facts of 1890s did not support the immiseration thesis. The claim “that capital was accumulating in fewer and fewer hands, and classes were being melted down into an ever poorer proletarianized ‘mass’ was not happening.” In fact (to borrow one of Marx’s phrases), industrial organization and ever-improving technology correlated with higher wages for the workers. The average worker’s life had improved, culminating with his rise better “from the social position of a proletarian to that of a citizen” with civic rights. Meanwhile, agricultural workers showed no interest in collectivized farming, preferring “to get their own land.” Liebknecht and Bebel were appalled. “Islam was invincible as long as it believed in itself,” Liebknecht wrote, “but the moment it began to compromise…it ceased to be a conquering force.” Similarly, “Socialism can neither conquer nor save the world if it ceases to believe in itself.” For the hard-core Communists, the secular religiosity of Communism trumped Marxian ‘science,’ although not intentionally, inasmuch as they continued to assert the scientific status of Marx’s doctrine. 

At the Fourth Congress of the Second International in 1900, the two sides papered over the dispute by admitting socialist participation in “bourgeois” governments to be “permissible only as a temporary expedient, adopted in exceptional cases under the force of circumstance.” Bernstein’s Revisionism was rejected. The now-prominent French socialist Jean Jaurès joined with the Russian, Karl Kautsky, declaring, “We are all good revolutionaries; let us make that clear and let us unite!”—echoing Marx’s call at the end of the Manifesto, nearly a half-century earlier. This earned him the condemnation of Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg, German socialists who called him “the Great Corrupter.” By 1903, the Germans had won, and Jaurès, outwardly pliant but “quietly seething,” told a Belgian colleague, “I think, my friend, that I am going to apply myself to the study of military questions.” That is, he foresaw the possibility of national warfare, a war in which German socialists and French socialists would fight for their countries and the Second International would die. 

“The Russian Revolution of 1905 injected new urgency to the question of how socialists might respond to a war between European powers.” Once again, it was war, the stunning defeat of Russia by an Asian power, Japan, that weakened an existing regime sufficiently to render it potentially vulnerable to revolutionary action. However, the socialists in Russia were split between the Leninist, “Bolshevik” (i.e., “Majority”) faction and Julius Martov’s “Menshevik” (“Minority”) faction. Both of these men were in exile when regime troops shot several hundred people in St. Petersburg on “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, 1905. The ensuing labor walkout induced Czar Nicholas II to convene a Russian parliament, the Duma, which legalized labor unions. Rosa Luxemburg endorsed the workers’ revolt, observing that in the “backward” conditions of Russia, “the mass strike” could indeed prove effective, resulting in parliamentarism—which, in backward Russia if not in advanced Germany or France, could be accepted on Marxist grounds. Internationally, the 1905 revolution also induced a recalculation for Jaurès and the French; Russia was an ally of France, providing a needed counterweight to powerful Germany. With Russia now the vanguard of the socialist movement, French socialists could turn pacifist, passing a resolution to resist militarism “by all means” in an attempt to contain the German socialists. “The problem was that absent precise international coordination, any country” that tried to imitate the Russian example of the general strike in, for example, munitions factories or the railways “would consign itself to a crushing defeat from an enemy that suffered no such disruption.” The German Bebel frankly acknowledged this. “Do not fool yourselves,” he told an English delegate to the 1907 Congress in Stuttgart; in the event of war, every German Social-Democrat would “shoulder his rifle and march to the French frontier.” As another SPD delegate remarked, more mildly, “It is not true that workers have no Fatherland. The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good Germans.” A few years later, it didn’t. And in France, poor Jaurès died from a bullet shot by a French nationalist, in July 1914, symbolizing the death of French pacifism among French socialists and indeed “the failure of the pacifist wing of the Second International to prevent the outbreak of European war in August.”

Ever-calculating Lenin hoped that the coming war would hasten the collapse of capitalism. He aimed “to transform politics into warfare” and warfare into politics, now that the bourgeois ruling class had armed their proletarians to fight what he deemed their “imperial war.” After all, previous great-power wars had been “progressive,” accelerating “the development of mankind by helping to destroy the most harmful and reactionary” social institutions (slavery, serfdom) and moderating “the most barbarous despotisms” (Russia, Turkey). Urging socialist soldiers to mutiny, he encouraged a policy of “revolutionary defeatism,” whereby proletarian soldiers would turn their weapons “against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.” To do so, the socialists must take advantage of their wartime bonds with fellow soldiers, working to indoctrinate them. And would not mothers of soldiers join the movement? After all, in the Paris Commune they had fought “side by side with the men.” Moving still further, Lenin published his pamphlets, Socialism and War and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in 1916, broadening his call for revolt to colonized peoples worldwide, another front in his envisioned war of workers of the world against international capitalism. “Lenin was prophesying—endorsing and promoting, basically—a whole age of unending armed conflict, of imperialist wars and civil wars and revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggle, one war begetting another in a global bonfire of violence as Marx’s prophesy from Das Kapital came true and the ‘expropriators were expropriated.'”

That didn’t happen worldwide, but Russia was another matter. The Bolsheviks played only a minor role in the February Revolution of 1917, when the Czar abdicated in the face of socialist agitation and the mutiny of a Petrograd garrison. Lenin proceeded from his exile in Switzerland through Germany not in the fabled ‘sealed train’ but with full cognizance of the German government, which provided them with an escort. Germans calculated that Lenin would further disrupt the Russian war effort, and so he did, although he got a lot more out of that than the Germans did. 

“In his view of politics as sublimated warfare, Lenin reduced revolution to its Marxist essence: Who had more men under arms, the government or its enemies?” By October 1917, Lenin saw that his Bolsheviks had more members under arms than the government did, in Moscow and, a bit later, St. Petersburg. “There was nothing secret or unsuspected about the Bolshevik putsch.” The post-czarist government was weak. “While much of European Russia, and nearly all of Asiatic Russia beyond the Urals, remained outside of Bolshevik control, with the capture of Russia’s two capital cities [i.e., Moscow and St. Petersburg] and Russian military headquarters in the October Revolution Lenin’s Bolsheviks had raised high the red flag.” They did so at a cost. In their peace settlement with Germany, the Communists ceded 1.3 million square miles, a quarter of its territory, on which 44 percent of its population lived, to the temporarily victorious Kaiser Reich.

Marxism hangs its theoretical-practical hat on economics, and it was there that the Soviet Union experienced its most signal failures, immediately. Lenin quickly established the Supreme Council of the National Economy (later renamed the State Planning Commission or Gosplan. “The planned economy” rapidly went out of control—that is, out of the control of people who had owned property and knew how to manage it. “Economic indices, already trending down, declined still more precipitously despite rampant inflation caused by runaway money printing.” In response, the planners effectively attempted to abolish money itself, imposing rationing and banning money payments for rent and fuel. Once they understood that “economic activity of any kind was impossible” without currency, they recurred to the gold standard, that symbol of apex capitalism. But by 1920, industrial production had fallen to eighteen percent of the prewar level.

Russia thus not only shared in the postwar economic depression, starvation, and disease that afflicted Europe but all of these things were exacerbated by the Communists’ bungling. Some five million Russians and Ukrainians died in 1921. Without the aid of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, the Red Cross, and other, ahem, bourgeois charities, which shipped and distributed more than two million tons of food and seed to Soviet Russia, Lenin’s regime might have fallen in its turn. But by 1922 the famine had ceased, and the influenza epidemic was over. Lenin continued his regime building with “a monopoly over the press, education, culture and Russian intellectual life more broadly.” The Marxist war on the family was implemented, with easy divorce and the first European law permitting abortion. Civil war between the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Whites” (not czarists, as the Leninists pretended, but partisans of republicanism), the latter aided by the European republics and the United States, gave cover for substantial purges, the extent of which McKeekin does not attempt to calculate.

Meanwhile, the short-lived Communist takeover of Hungary saw similar ruling procedures. Under People’s Commissioner for Education György Lukács, sex education was introduced in the primary schools as a part of his aim to rid his country of “‘bourgeois’ morals on monogamy, premarital sex, and female chastity.” Although this attempt at what he called “revolutionary destruction,” the “one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” died with the regime, it was transferred to “the avant-garde Marxists of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (the ‘Frankfurt School’)” and eventually landed in the West “by way of Frankfurt School disciples such as Herbert Marcuse and Charles Reich.” Lenin sent Soviet troops across Romania in what turned out to be a futile attempt to shore up the Hungarian Communists. He also invaded Poland, nearly taking Warsaw before Polish troops under the command of General Józef Pilsudski, outnumbered nearly two-to-one, drove them back to Ukraine.

Lenin died in January 1924. Before doing so, he initiated two important policies. The first, internal, measure, the New Economic Policy, was intended to strengthen the still-weak Soviet economy by loosening state controls over business without relinquishing Party rule. The second, foreign, policy was support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang, a modernizing armed party that had overthrown the Qing Dynasty. By then, it was fighting against rival warlord armies; Lenin backed them in the hopes of infiltrating the organization with his own agents—the first example of what would become known as a ‘united front’ or ‘popular front’ strategy.

Lenin called his NEP a temporary (if likely to be long-lasting) instance of what he termed, in his ever-inventive rhetoric, “state capitalism.” Money was readmitted, replacing rationing. This “was a painful compromise for the Communist party, a constant reminder of failure,” a concession to bourgeois decadence. Leon Trotsky himself detested it. Stalin eliminated him, along with other rivals for power, but he faced a problem: the NEP and its administrators, the “nepmen,” detested by hard-core Communists, were becoming too successful, their leader, Nikoli Bukharin, too powerful. “Who would vanquish whom, Communism or private capital?” A very bad harvest 1927 harvest served as a pretext for getting rid of the nepmen; after collectivizing agriculture, Stalin ordered the secret police to arrest nearly 2.7 million, throwing them into the newly founded Gulag to endure forced labor. Collectivization spurred peasant resistance; reviving Lenin’s term kulak for disobedient peasants, Stalin initiated a terror campaign consisting of grain confiscations and public hangings. He also ramped up “the confiscation of Church valuables with” (as he put it) “the most rabid and merciless energy.” Yet the resistance continued, with some 8,000 peasant revolts and protest in the first quarter of 1930; in response, the Politburo decreed the “elimination of kulaks as a class.” The population of the Gulag swelled still further. But by killing or imprisoning “the most productive peasant smallholders” and appropriating their lands and produce, Stalin brought down the Great Famine of 1932-33. “Cannibalism was commonly observed” and duly reported to Stalin by the secret police. In Ukraine alone, where the event is remembered as the Holodomor or “Terror-Famine,” “at least 3 million or 4 million victims starved to death, often in gruesome conditions.” In Kazakhstan, with its sparser population, two million starved. All of this coincided with Stalin’s drive to industrialize; he ordered confiscated grain to be sold abroad in order to fund his first Five-Year Plan. He retained other grain supplies to feed the factory workers, “even while deported Russian and Ukrainian ‘kulaks’ and Central Asian nomads, like the nepmen before them, furnished an almost bottomless supply of forced labor for Stalin’s industrialization drive.” McKeekin duly remarks that Western capitalist firms designed the industrial plants, a point acknowledged in an official Soviet history published in 1933, which called the Five-Year Plan “a combination of American business and science with Bolshevik wisdom.” 

Bolshevik wisdom continued on its rampage, as “Stalin found yet more categories of people to punish for his regime’s failures.” The years 1936-38 saw an even greater terror campaign, now called “the Great Terror,” which saw the show trials and ‘purge’ of Communist Party members themselves, those whom Stalin deemed insufficiently fanatical. “Whether out of party loyalty, a sense of guilt for their own role in terrorizing the country, or because they had been tortured in the notorious cells of the Lubyanka prison, defendants invariably confessed all” and faced what Stalin termed “death by shooting.” Ever inventive, Stalin’s Bolshevik wisdom extended the possibility of the death penalty to minors down to the age of twelve, enabling the Man of Steel “to threaten political opponents with the murder of their children, in case guilt and torture were not enough to induce show-trial confessions.” 

McKeekin finds in these atrocities “a certain logic endemic to Communism.” After all, “until the planned economic utopia was achieved, those standing in the way might become casualties in the war between Soviet Communism and its enemies, be they ‘capitalist’ agents, spies of ‘imperialist’ powers, industrial ‘wreckers,’ saboteurs, or mere troublemakers.” When the 1937 census numbers “came in 15 million lower than expected,” Stalin simply ordered the census board members arrested for their act of “treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR.” Communism ruled its subjects by force and spread its regime abroad also “by force of arms.” 

All the while, the Soviet Union enjoyed substantial prestige, around the world. To many, the Great Depression seemed capitalism’s death rattle, the rise of Nazism in the heart of Europe its reductio ad malorem. Sympathetic ‘fellow travelers’ toured Russia, visiting carefully constructed and organized ‘Potemkin villages,’ steered away from the sites of mass murder and squalor. This led many on the Left in the republics to form the Popular Front, the ‘one big Left’ opposed to fascism. “The Popular Front was a godsend,” McKeekin chooses the word with a certain irony, “for Soviet foreign relations,” not least in the United States, where “the once-tiny Communist Part USA, or CPUSA, received instructions from Moscow about the new ‘Popular Front’ doctrine,” including an order to stop calling Franklin Roosevelt a fascist. The New Dealers relaxed their guard, as Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles removed “Stalin-phobes” from the State Department’s East European Affairs Division. Soviet espionage in the United States and in Great Britain enjoyed what should have been a predictable uptick. Meanwhile, Spain and France saw the Left win national elections in 1936, sparking civil war in Spain and another ’cause’ for the Popular Front to back. The Spanish Left had founded a supposedly republican regime, but its two premiers were Communists—a “facade of ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary democracy” with “shadowy Communist advisers and agents—some Spanish, some foreign European, some Soviet Russian—rul[ing] behind the scenes.” 

Stalin himself had no problem in forging a not-so-popular ‘front’ with the Nazis, negotiating arms deals with Hitler’s regime at the same time the anti-Communist ‘fascists’ in Spain, led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco and indeed backed by the Nazis, were defeating the Stalin-backed regime there. Most notoriously, Hitler and Stalin agreed to partition Poland between them. This shocked many of the fellow travelers, and when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, even many French Communists deserted the Party, a bit too late. But with Hitler on the rampage, Soviet territorial acquisitions in Central Europe were downplayed in the Western media. And not only land grabs but regime change, Soviet-style, as Stalin ordered the deaths of more than 25,000 Polish military officers and other officials; their wives and children were deported to “special labor camps” in Kazakhstan. Intimidated, the rulers of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania quickly submitted to Stalin’s dictates, with the usual purges immediately following. Hitler was not amused and began to prepare for war with the Soviet Union; Stalin saw it, prepared for the assault but eventually found that his preparations were inadequate to fend off the initial German assault, which came in June 1941. A timely troop transfer from Siberia (made possible by Soviet intel, which showed that the soldiers wouldn’t be needed against Japan, whose rulers intended to attack the United States, not Russia); American Lend-Lease aid; the same ‘General Winter’ that had ruined Napoleon’s army in the previous century; brutal ‘discipline’ of Russian subjects by the secret police; and “Stalin’s courageous decision to stay in Moscow,” strengthening morale, prevented a crushing defeat, at the cost of tens of millions dead. The 1944 victory in alliance with the Western republics restored worldwide esteem for the Soviet regime, as “the Great Patriotic War was both the finest moment of Soviet history, the one unquestionable geopolitical achievement Communists everywhere could claim as their own, and the movement’s most harrowing and near-fatal episode.” “Oblivious to both horrendous NKVD disciplinary measures and the Lend-lease story, which was little reported at the time, many Westerners generously credited Stalin and his government with the victory.” The fact that “Communist fortunes still depended on military force—on the successes and failures of the Red Army and its clients” and not so much on economic performance or Bolshevik wisdom—went largely unnoticed.

Further, in Central Europe the Soviets were seen as liberators, at first. This soon changed, since “the use of both industrial property and slave labor as ‘reparations in kind’ [for their alliances with the Nazis] had actually been codified into the Yalta agreement of February 1945, approved by both Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and Stalin was not shy about exploiting either resource.” Germany alone supplied almost two million slave laborers to the Soviet Union. Stalin exacted some one million slaves from smaller Romania. Even Bulgaria, which had refused to offer troops to supplement the Nazi forces in Russia, suffered a “wave of Communist Terror” and subjected to collectivization of its agriculture in “a small-scale Holodomor.” By 1949, “the ‘people’s democracies’ were thoroughly Stalinized, with nearly identical secret police forces, all thoroughly penetrated by and loyal to their Soviet handlers, answering to the Comintern-esque ‘Cominform’ in Moscow, and with state-planed economies that had production targets and mandatory trade quotas coordinated…in the USSR via the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comcon).” When the United States and its allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, this served as a useful pretext to maintain the tightness of the screws. [1]

In China, what would prove an even more momentous and enduring Communist revolution followed the war. Previously, the Kuomintang regime under Chiang Kai-Shek had kept Mao Zedong’s Communists underground, following their failed uprising in 1927. Stalin had lost interest in promoting such things there, worrying more about Japan’s imperial moves in neighboring Manchuria. At the same time, however, the invasion helped the Chinese Communists because it forced Chiang to deploy forces to his northern border, taking the pressure off them. This proved temporary; another military campaign against the Communists drove them on the “Long March” to northeastern China, next to the Soviet Mongolian Republic. Seven thousands of 200,000 Communists survived the ordeal. But when Japan invaded in 1937, “it was the Nationalists who did the fighting and dying against Japan, not the Communists,” who “observed from the sidelines.” In 1944, Stalin obtained Lend-Lease equipment for a major incursion into Asia,” where the United States and its allies were still fighting, even as the Nazi regime had been brought down. This enabled Stalin’s army to liberate Manchuria, not the Nationalists. The Kuomintang, America, and Britain “had spent four years softening up Japan’s forces”; the Soviets lost relatively few men in exchange for the victory. “Stalin had played his cards perfectly,” proving once again that Bolshevik wisdom worked better in war than in peace.

President Harry Truman—the man who, with great good fortune, had replaced Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president, averting the debacle of saddling the United States with a Communist sympathizer as president, upon FDR’s death—understood the threat Stalin posed in Europe and the United States, but not his machinations in China. Stalin made a show out of recognizing the Nationalist government while putting his forces in control of a naval base at two ports, “giving [him] control over Manchurian communications with the outside world.” He also exacted pledges from Mao to end the civil war and form a unity government with Chiang, neither of which Mao had any intention to keep. Nor did Stalin want him to. He supplied his ally with a raft of military equipment and told him to “expand towards the north.” “By October 1945. “Manchuria, the richest and most industrialized region in China, was likely lost for good to the Chinese national government, owing to Soviet wiles and American naïveté,” while Stalin, never won to ignore a quid pro quo, stripped the country of “almost $900 million worth of good and equipment.” As to a promise made to Chiang to withdraw Soviet troops three months after the end of the war—well, no.

No less naïve than Truman, United States Army Chief of Staff George Marshall visited China in an attempt “to establish a coalition government between Chiang and Mao—two mortal political enemies whose civil war had just bloodily resumed.” Inanely, Truman had warned Chiang that US aid to his government would be cut off if it were used to fight Mao. As a result, “by 1947, the proxy conflict in China was wholly one-sided: Stalin provided Mao with whatever he needed in Manchuria…while the United States forbade Chiang to use American arms to defend his government against the Communists.” That is, even as the US administration announced its “Truman Doctrine,” committing aid to support “free peoples” against “Communist subversion or armed aggression,” that policy was ignored in China. By the time Truman saw what was happening it was too late. The “People’s Liberation Army” took Beijing in January 1949; “so rapid was the advance of Mao’s Communist armies that Stalin himself was taken aback,” worried that a strong Communist China with its capital at great distance from the Soviet Union might well spin out of his control. Too late for him, too. Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China at the end of the year, soon invading Tibet and sending troops into Korea to aid the Communists there and initiating the usual campaign of state-sponsored terror at home. As for “the cultural sphere, Mao channeled Hitler more than Stalin,” launching an “anti-intellectual thought-reform campaign” which “saw public book burnings so colossal that they were measured by the volume,” with 237 metric tons of books “torched” in Shanghai alone. These were replaced by more suitable ideological fare under the slogan, “Learn from the Soviet Union.” 

Mao cannot be said to have mellowed in subsequent years. During a 1957 trip to Moscow, “he hinted that the ultimate goal was for the Communist world to win a world war with the capitalist powers—a war that, he predicted with curious confidence, would kill ‘a third,’ or ‘if it is a little higher it could be half,’ of the world’s population, which he reckoned at ‘2.7 billion people.'” Not to worry: as he put it, “imperialism would be erased, the whole world will become socialist” and “after a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again.”

Meanwhile, in lieu of that prospect, Mao launched his program of forced industrialization, the “Great Leap Forward.” He took a similarly long view of things, coining still another slogan, “Three Years of Hard Work Is Ten Thousand Years of Happiness.” Here, the calculation was “one dead worker for each million cubic meters of soil removed”; at that rate, one of his minions remarked, I can “move 30 billion cubic meters” at the expense of a mere 30,000 dead. In the event, some 45 million Chinese died by famine in the years 1958-1962, although the Chinese Communist Party admits only 20 million. This was too much even for the reigning Soviet tyrant, Nikita Khruschev, who ventured to criticize the “Leap,” even as he had criticized some of Stalin’s excesses in his well-publicized “Secret Speech” at a Communist Party Congress, a few years earlier. “Of course,” McKeekin notes, “what most animated Khruschev and his audience” at that point “was not Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet people as such, but his treatment of Communists.” That was going too far.

As far as Mao was concerned, Khruschev was the one who had gone too far. His laxity had inspired rebellion against the Communist regimes in Hungary and East Berlin. Stalemated in Europe, Khruschev pushed into the newly-christened ‘Third World’ in the wake of declining French, Dutch, and British imperialism there. He supported Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah in Ghana, Castro in Cuba, and Communist movements throughout Latin America. After Khruschev himself was deposed by his fellow Politburo members, the Soviets continued these efforts. By the 1970s, the future of Communism looked bright, even if the Sino-Soviet rift widened.

The Chinese regime successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1964 and launched the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966. This time, the Soviet Union was no longer the model, Mao having published his “Little Red Book” not of Bolshevik but of Maoist wisdom a couple of years earlier. Chinese youth, organized as the “Red Guards,” killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Chinese while brandishing this new bible, despite the protestations of Leonid Brezhnev, now head of the Soviet Politburo. Mao also funded Pol Pot, the Cambodian Communist Party leader whose Red Guard equivalents eventually murdered something like a quarter to a third of all Cambodians—in terms of percentage of population, the worst genocide in modern history. Most Western historians blamed North Vietnam and the United States for igniting the catastrophe by their conduct in the ongoing Vietnam War, “ignoring the Chinese role entirely.”

Back in the West, the United States and its allies attempted to blunt Soviet advances with the policy of détente, initially proposed by French president Charles de Gaulle in the mid-1960s. It didn’t work because regimes finally determine policy, foreign as well as domestic, and the Soviet regime didn’t change. “The only real price Brezhnev paid for détente was Western scrutiny of certain Soviet human rights abuses,” about which it lacked the power to do much. Détente did lead to an even more futile policy of entente conceived by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt; his Ostpolitik resulted primarily in an increase of spying and bribery by East Germany in West Germany.

While undermining the republics, European Communists talked peace. “The crowning jewel of Soviet peace propaganda was the ‘nuclear freeze movement’ that swept across Western Europe and the United States in the early 1980s.” The election of the strongly anti-Communist Ronald Reagan to the presidency provoked “fears and anxieties…about the terrifying prospect of nuclear war” among many, so it wasn’t as though the campaign had no genuine support in the West, “but when the Soviet archives were opened in 1991 it was revealed that the campaign was also highly organized and funded by the Kremlin” to a tune of almost $600 million—equivalent to $1.8 billion in 2023 dollars. The Politburo hoped “to lull Western Europeans to sleep as Moscow deployed a new arsenal of mobile, medium-range SS-20 missiles targeting their capital cities, ideally causing a NATO split between the United States and its European allies, whose leaders might not trust that American presidents would really risk courting the obliteration of Washington, New York, Chicago, and other US cities with a retaliatory nuclear missile strike to defend Bonn, Paris, or London.” The nuclear freeze and the missile buildup, “we now know, were planned out together.” When the Reagan Administration rejected calls for the ‘freeze,’ and instead planned to station its own intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany, mass marches were staged in NATO capitals as well as Vienna and Stockholm. “None other than Ostpolitik designer Willy Brandt, who was corresponding regularly with Soviet officials about the nuclear freeze movement, headlined the…protests in Berlin.” That is, the Politburo had convinced millions of West Europeans (and not a few Americans) that blame for the supposedly impending nuclear holocaust lay not with “the regime whose deadly arsenal of mobile, medium-range SS-20 nuclear missiles were now aimed squarely at them…but rather the US government trying to defend them.” [2]

It all might have worked, had not the European nations ruled by the Communists not begun to ‘demonstrate’ even more impressively, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland. “Here was a general strike of the laboring masses against ‘proletarian dictatorship,’ giving the lie to the claim of Communists to rule in the name of the workers” in what Brezhnev, working himself up into a state of moral indignation, termed a “brazen challenge” aimed at “provok[ing] unrest in socialist countries and stir[ring] up grounds of all kinds of renegades.” While Bulgaria remained loyal (the daughter of the local tyrant there briefly became a feminist glamor girl, a sort of Eastern Bloc Gloria Steinem), this played better in the West than it did in the Middle East and Central Asia, “as the Soviets were about to discover in Afghanistan.” As to the West, however, Reagan won re-election in a landslide (primarily on the strength of the economy, which had rebounded from its 1970s doldrums), the Pershing missiles were installed, and the nuclear freeze movement, now defunded, deflated.

There had been “a time when [Afghanistan’s] capital, Kabul, was the shining hope of Communist modernizers,” as Afghanistan under King Ghazi Amanullah Khan “was one of the first foreign countries to recognize and signed a Treaty of Friendship with the USSR in 1921, which paved the way for decades of Soviet investment in the country,” continuing far beyond Khan’s abdication in 1929. Although the United States “made some inroads in Kabul in the 1950s” as part of its strategy of containing Soviet expansion, the war in Vietnam precluded any really effective engagement and the Soviets subsidized the newly-formed Afghan Communist Party, beginning in the mid-1960s. The Party staged a successful coup in 1978. But “like the British before them and the Americans after, the Soviets swiftly discovered that political coups or regime changes in Kabul did not necessarily register in the Afghan countryside,” with its ever-feuding tribes, many animated by fundamentalist forms of Islam. As in the 1920s, so in the 1970s and 1980s, the tribal chiefs declared jihad against the modernizers and their foreign backers. The Politburo decided to commit military specialists and KGB advisers in support of the Communist regime, subsequently sending in the Red Army, at a cost of some 1,700 dead every year. In reaction, the West paused détente, imposed economic sanctions, increased military spending (including the anti-missile missile system, called ‘Star Wars’ by its embattled domestic critics), and supported the jihadis. 

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In an attempt to “revitalize the Soviet economy in order to ramp up military spending (italics added), he introduced another Five-Year Plan,” which included perestroika or “reconstruction.” That is, he and his Politburo colleagues enacted a new version of the NEP. Although the economy never came close to matching the West in its production of consumer goods, its improvement did enable him to outstrip even the substantial U.S. military buildup. In so doing, however, the Soviets overspent, putting that buildup into question, while the Chinese Communists, after Mao’s death, introduced their own version of a NEP without overspending. The difference in the future, short, history of the Soviet Union and the future, long history of the People’s Republic, originates there. But there was also Western investment in China, contrasting with the withdrawal of investment from the Soviet Union. Western businessmen had been mesmerized by the sheer size of the Chinese ‘market’ since the nineteenth century; absent any military adventurism by China, they remained so. Businessmen told Western politicians, and perhaps themselves, that increased trade and investment would liberalize the regime. It didn’t; the Chinese “never made so much as a nod toward political liberalization, imposing a policy allowing families to have only one child (leading to “thousands of gruesome coerced late-term abortions”) and crushing a democratization movement led by students in the spring of 1989. His military and secret police allies overthrew Gorbachev, that year; he could not summon the forces he needed to keep him in power; soon, the restive captive nations in eastern and central Europe rebelled, and there wasn’t much the weakened regime could do to stop them. In Russia, the regime “vanished once the sword was shattered,” whereas “in China, the sword was still there.” 

Today, China is more powerful than ever, even if its ‘image’ in the West is far less attractive than was that of the Soviet Union often was. “Few hard-core Western Communists, and fewer still progressive reformers and women’s rights activists, look to Beijing today for inspiration in the way so many did to Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s, or again in the 1970s and 1980s.” Yet “in terms of raw economic and the institutional and often personal leverage that comes with it, the CCP has been more successful than the Soviets ever were,” purchasing “politicians, firms, and real estate,” not to mention technicians and business executives, sending its students to work in Western research laboratories and its spies everywhere, and, when that reaches its limits, stealing technology. They take many of these tactics from Lenin and Stalin, but they have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. They have outnegotiated their enemies. “In exchange for the United States granting China unprecedented access to its market and easing the legal path for US multinational corporations to outsource manufacturing to China, the CCP conceded—nothing.” If anything, Communist Chinese methods of surveillance and political censorship have increased in the West, not only in the universities but in private corporations. “Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.”

 

Note

1. The apparent exception, Yugoslavia, in which the Communist Party chief Josip Broz Tito, having led the resistance to Nazi occupiers during the war, taken power, and effected a regime change to tyranny in 1945, pursued a foreign policy independent of Moscow. Unfortunately, “in his political and economic policies” in Yugoslavia itself “Tito was arguably more Stalinist than Stalin”—a “pioneer in political terror himself.”
2. For a contemporaneous statement in opposition to the ‘freeze,’ see “Thoughts on the Nuclear ‘Freeze'” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”