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To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism
From an award-winning historian, a new global history of Communism When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe. In To Overthrow the World, Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes. Tracing Communism’s ascent from theory to practice, McMeekin ranges from Karl Marx’s writings to the rise and fall of the USSR under Stalin to Mao’s rise to power in China to the acceleration of Communist or Communist-inspired policies around the world in the twenty-first century. McMeekin argues, however, that despite the endurance of Communism, it remains deeply unpopular as a political form. Where it has arisen, it has always arisen by force. Blending historical narrative with cutting-edge scholarship, To Overthrow the World revolutionizes our understanding of the evolution of Communism—an idea that seemingly cannot die.
544 pages, Hardcover
First published September 10, 2024
116 people are currently reading
4498 people want to read
About the author
Sean McMeekin
14 books221 followersSean McMeekin is an American historian, focused on European history of the early 20th century. His main research interests include modern German history, Russian history, communism, and the origins of the First and Second World Wars and the roles of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
He has authored eight books, along with scholarly articles which have appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, Common Knowledge, Current History, Historically Speaking, The World Today, and Communisme. He is currently Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College.
He has authored eight books, along with scholarly articles which have appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, Common Knowledge, Current History, Historically Speaking, The World Today, and Communisme. He is currently Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
May 3, 2024
A well-orchestrated, detailed recount of the history and the evolution of communist ideology.
This is quite possibly the most well-researched, non-biased technical breakdown of this topic that I have found thus far, and is perfect for the studying Historian, or for the casual learner seeking to understand how we got to the political climate we face today.
I find that locating information seeking to understand the polarity in ideology between Western capitalists and international communist ideals is difficult to find, and often focuses on points critically condemning communism and only so. While I understand how this came to be after the heated climate of the Cold War, it doesn't help to fully understand the complete picture. That is where this book is so beautifully done.
This book bridges the connection between the use of communist-Marxist ideals and the evolution of the modern dictator / authoritarian. I consider this a vital resource to anyone seeking to understand the world (particularly outside Western capitalistic societies) on a deeper ideological level, and so perhaps you can develop thoroughly educated opinions in the fields of politics and global matters.
I received this e-book from NetGalley and the publisher Basic Books. Thank you for providing this title in exchange for an honest review. As a studying Historian and collector of important books, I will be purchasing a physical copy for my library when it is published later this year.
Thank you to the author Sean McMeekin for taking the time to research and release such a detailed resource as well.
This is quite possibly the most well-researched, non-biased technical breakdown of this topic that I have found thus far, and is perfect for the studying Historian, or for the casual learner seeking to understand how we got to the political climate we face today.
I find that locating information seeking to understand the polarity in ideology between Western capitalists and international communist ideals is difficult to find, and often focuses on points critically condemning communism and only so. While I understand how this came to be after the heated climate of the Cold War, it doesn't help to fully understand the complete picture. That is where this book is so beautifully done.
This book bridges the connection between the use of communist-Marxist ideals and the evolution of the modern dictator / authoritarian. I consider this a vital resource to anyone seeking to understand the world (particularly outside Western capitalistic societies) on a deeper ideological level, and so perhaps you can develop thoroughly educated opinions in the fields of politics and global matters.
I received this e-book from NetGalley and the publisher Basic Books. Thank you for providing this title in exchange for an honest review. As a studying Historian and collector of important books, I will be purchasing a physical copy for my library when it is published later this year.
Thank you to the author Sean McMeekin for taking the time to research and release such a detailed resource as well.
January 26, 2025
This book was a mission impossible - to present so much historical material (not to mention the necessary analysis of the broader context) in just a single (not monumental) book - it was clear that satisfying every reader is just not possible. Still, I give it a full 5 stars - well-deserved ones. Why?
1. Keeping in mind the volume constraints, the author did VERY WELL when it comes to content selection. There's a good balance between ideological roots, the "inception," and what happened next.
2. The approach is more of a historian than of a journalist - facts, correlations, wider landscape - everything is there for you - the READER - to assess
3. I knew A LOT about the October Revolution, Cold War, and communism in Eastern Europe, but even with my knowledge, I really appreciate the "bridging" McMeekin has made to present how certain things originated - e.g., very early Russian interest in Afghanistan, the ideological impact of Commune de Paris, Pol Pot's inspiration from what he has seen in China, etc.
To have the full picture, you'd need to read tens (I'm not exaggerating) heavy tomes - I still encourage you to do that, for the sake of learning what people can do to people. But if you have time for just one short book on what communism did to the world, pick this one.
1. Keeping in mind the volume constraints, the author did VERY WELL when it comes to content selection. There's a good balance between ideological roots, the "inception," and what happened next.
2. The approach is more of a historian than of a journalist - facts, correlations, wider landscape - everything is there for you - the READER - to assess
3. I knew A LOT about the October Revolution, Cold War, and communism in Eastern Europe, but even with my knowledge, I really appreciate the "bridging" McMeekin has made to present how certain things originated - e.g., very early Russian interest in Afghanistan, the ideological impact of Commune de Paris, Pol Pot's inspiration from what he has seen in China, etc.
To have the full picture, you'd need to read tens (I'm not exaggerating) heavy tomes - I still encourage you to do that, for the sake of learning what people can do to people. But if you have time for just one short book on what communism did to the world, pick this one.
January 9, 2025
Just finished:
"To Overthrow The World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism"
By: Sean McMeekin
New York: Basic Books, 2024.
The best read if the year so far. While I thought McMeekin should have spent more time on the rise of Communism in it's 21st Century form, I'd recommend this book to anyone wanting to know about Communism in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Not ones does McMeekin cover Marx, the Soviet Union, and Mao's China, he accounts for the Soviet satellites, Yugoslavia, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and the Khumer Rouge (maybe the most evil form of communism to exist).
Here some takeaway.
Russia on paper should have been the last country to embrace Communism First.
Stalin wanted a divided China.
Mao was more like the Nazis in his drive to burn books.
Tito tended to be more zealous in executing Stalin's wishes.
Ceausescu looked at China for leadership in the Communist world.
Technological advancements, whether by the Soviets or CCP were either built upon American investment or stealing trade secrets.
The author's conclusion regarding how the West is embracing certain totalitarian measures was thought provoking even if I think it might be more complex than McMeekin suggests.
"To Overthrow The World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism"
By: Sean McMeekin
New York: Basic Books, 2024.
The best read if the year so far. While I thought McMeekin should have spent more time on the rise of Communism in it's 21st Century form, I'd recommend this book to anyone wanting to know about Communism in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Not ones does McMeekin cover Marx, the Soviet Union, and Mao's China, he accounts for the Soviet satellites, Yugoslavia, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and the Khumer Rouge (maybe the most evil form of communism to exist).
Here some takeaway.
Russia on paper should have been the last country to embrace Communism First.
Stalin wanted a divided China.
Mao was more like the Nazis in his drive to burn books.
Tito tended to be more zealous in executing Stalin's wishes.
Ceausescu looked at China for leadership in the Communist world.
Technological advancements, whether by the Soviets or CCP were either built upon American investment or stealing trade secrets.
The author's conclusion regarding how the West is embracing certain totalitarian measures was thought provoking even if I think it might be more complex than McMeekin suggests.
October 19, 2024
In the history of the world there have been few ideas as pernicious to human flourishing as Marxist- Leninist theory. As one who lived under the tension between Communism and Democracy at it most contentious, I was delighted to read Sean McMeekin's history of communism. The book is admirably short for so detailed and difficult subject and gives readers enough information to stimulate thought and a desire to know more.
Bad ideas tend to never die and the current fascination with communism and its ugly cousin socialism indicates that this concept of governance and social organization falls squarely in the camp of terrible ideas. It is hard to find any positive human good that owes its birth to communism or Marxist- Leninist thought. Rather this book and any first-hand experience with communism should serve as a primer for what not to do.
Throughout the history of communism, we see mass starvation, repression by secret police, totalitarian governments and general destruction of human dignity. The desire to export its thinking is perhaps understandable, all ideologies seek converts, but what is inexplicable is the desire of normally well-reasoned people to adopt it even today after all of the evils have been exposed.
Perhaps it is part of the desire of humans to seek the best and if that were the case it might be viewed as admirable, but more likely it is a fuzzy headed concept that while communism in Russia was suborned by Stalin, if it were tried in other places it would succeed in creating heaven on earth. Yet its failures in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Eastern Europe indicate it won't work anywhere. George Orwell once observed that some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
The plain fact is that communism cannot succeed without repression and totalitarianism because it violates the very essence of human nature. It replaces any sacred belief with worship of the state, it reduces human interactions to informing and spying, it denies people the right to benefit from their own efforts, offering only misery and imprisonment in return. It suppresses minorities and destroys free inquiry. Neither socialism or communism are separable from coercion whether from governmental power or willing disavowal of freedom.
Those who worship at the feet of the false conclusions and theories of Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin, would be well advised to read this book. At least it would provide some context to the evils humans create when they seek to fundamentally alter the human spirit.
Bad ideas tend to never die and the current fascination with communism and its ugly cousin socialism indicates that this concept of governance and social organization falls squarely in the camp of terrible ideas. It is hard to find any positive human good that owes its birth to communism or Marxist- Leninist thought. Rather this book and any first-hand experience with communism should serve as a primer for what not to do.
Throughout the history of communism, we see mass starvation, repression by secret police, totalitarian governments and general destruction of human dignity. The desire to export its thinking is perhaps understandable, all ideologies seek converts, but what is inexplicable is the desire of normally well-reasoned people to adopt it even today after all of the evils have been exposed.
Perhaps it is part of the desire of humans to seek the best and if that were the case it might be viewed as admirable, but more likely it is a fuzzy headed concept that while communism in Russia was suborned by Stalin, if it were tried in other places it would succeed in creating heaven on earth. Yet its failures in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Eastern Europe indicate it won't work anywhere. George Orwell once observed that some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
The plain fact is that communism cannot succeed without repression and totalitarianism because it violates the very essence of human nature. It replaces any sacred belief with worship of the state, it reduces human interactions to informing and spying, it denies people the right to benefit from their own efforts, offering only misery and imprisonment in return. It suppresses minorities and destroys free inquiry. Neither socialism or communism are separable from coercion whether from governmental power or willing disavowal of freedom.
Those who worship at the feet of the false conclusions and theories of Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin, would be well advised to read this book. At least it would provide some context to the evils humans create when they seek to fundamentally alter the human spirit.
December 17, 2025
"The history of Communism may not always be edifying or reassuring, but it is worth reexamining dispassionately, without either prejudice or wishful thinking. Let us begin..."
To Overthrow the World was an interesting account of the ideology of Socialism/Communism. An ideology that would go on to produce the worst manmade catastrophe in history; 100 million dead in 100 years.
Author Sean McMeekin is an American historian, focused on European history of the early 20th century. His main research interests include modern German history, Russian history, communism, and the origins of the First and Second World Wars and the roles of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Sean McMeekin:
McMeekin opens the book with a decent preface. The introduction talks about the beginnings of Communist philosophy in late 1700s France. The book is a very comprehensive telling of the history and implementation of Communist political doctrine in many of the countries around the world that experimented with it.
Sadly, I found quite a lot of the first ~half of this book to be overly verbose and long-winded. IMHO, a good ~30% of the writing here could have been edited out with no overall loss to the finished product. Fortunately, the writing gained momentum as it went, and became more lively as the book went on.
In this quote, the author talks about how socialism takes over society:
Some more of what is covered here by the author includes:
• Vladimir Lenin and Russia's Bolsheviks
• The roots of Communist philosophy; Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels
• Joseph Stalin and his many policies
• The Russian GULAG system and Holodomor Famine
• Stalin's industrialization of Russia
• The emergence of Communism In China; Mao Zedong
• The Chinese civil War; Mao's "Long March"
• Mao's efforts to industrialize China; his "5-year plans"
• Mao's "Great Famine and "Cultural Revolution"
• Head of Russia's Secret Police (NKVD) Lavrentiy Beria; his execution
• Cambodia's Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge; genocide
• The Romanian Communist government of Nicolae Ceaușescu
• “State Planning Theme 14.25;” East Germany forcing its Olympic athletes to take A/AS
• Afghanistan and Soviet influence; invasion/war
• Deng Xiaoping's efforts at modernizing China's economy; spying on /Japanese tech
• China's "1 Child Policy"
• The Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests
• The fall of Socialism in Eastern Europe: Germany, Romania, and Bosnia
• The collapse of the USSR; Yeltsin and Gorbechev
• A decent epilogue that talks about the current “Sino-formed” state of modern Western countries; restriction of personal freedoms, cancel-culture, and de-banking of "problematic" individuals
As the book wraps up, the author talks about the concessions the West made towards Communist China, and what a raw deal they got in return:
********************
Although I felt it got off to a bit of a slow start, To Overthrow the World seemingly got better as it went. I have usually found this to be reversed. Typically, books start off with a bang, and then drag on as they progress.
I enjoyed the writing here in the last ~half of the book. It was quite a good summary of Communism in action in the 21st century. I would recommend this one.
4.5 stars
To Overthrow the World was an interesting account of the ideology of Socialism/Communism. An ideology that would go on to produce the worst manmade catastrophe in history; 100 million dead in 100 years.
Author Sean McMeekin is an American historian, focused on European history of the early 20th century. His main research interests include modern German history, Russian history, communism, and the origins of the First and Second World Wars and the roles of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Sean McMeekin:
McMeekin opens the book with a decent preface. The introduction talks about the beginnings of Communist philosophy in late 1700s France. The book is a very comprehensive telling of the history and implementation of Communist political doctrine in many of the countries around the world that experimented with it.
Sadly, I found quite a lot of the first ~half of this book to be overly verbose and long-winded. IMHO, a good ~30% of the writing here could have been edited out with no overall loss to the finished product. Fortunately, the writing gained momentum as it went, and became more lively as the book went on.
In this quote, the author talks about how socialism takes over society:
"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.
Once the regime’s sword was lifted, Communist parties crumbled quickly; if the sword remained, the party did too.
Nor, for that matter, was the emergence of Communist governments in the twentieth century in the first place preordained by some Hegelian- Marxist law of history, however much Karl Marx and his acolytes would have wished it so. As we will see in the pages ahead, the emergence of Communism in Russia, China, and their satellites required a series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions of angry and impressionable young men. Despite the party’s claim to speak for the proletarian masses of humanity, and several much ballyhooed near misses, Communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box."
Some more of what is covered here by the author includes:
• Vladimir Lenin and Russia's Bolsheviks
• The roots of Communist philosophy; Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels
• Joseph Stalin and his many policies
• The Russian GULAG system and Holodomor Famine
• Stalin's industrialization of Russia
• The emergence of Communism In China; Mao Zedong
• The Chinese civil War; Mao's "Long March"
• Mao's efforts to industrialize China; his "5-year plans"
• Mao's "Great Famine and "Cultural Revolution"
• Head of Russia's Secret Police (NKVD) Lavrentiy Beria; his execution
• Cambodia's Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge; genocide
• The Romanian Communist government of Nicolae Ceaușescu
• “State Planning Theme 14.25;” East Germany forcing its Olympic athletes to take A/AS
• Afghanistan and Soviet influence; invasion/war
• Deng Xiaoping's efforts at modernizing China's economy; spying on /Japanese tech
• China's "1 Child Policy"
• The Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests
• The fall of Socialism in Eastern Europe: Germany, Romania, and Bosnia
• The collapse of the USSR; Yeltsin and Gorbechev
• A decent epilogue that talks about the current “Sino-formed” state of modern Western countries; restriction of personal freedoms, cancel-culture, and de-banking of "problematic" individuals
As the book wraps up, the author talks about the concessions the West made towards Communist China, and what a raw deal they got in return:
"To promote Beijing’s entry into the WTO at the turn of the millennium, Washington politicians promised Americans that opening China for trade would moderate Communism. As Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, put it, “By entering the WTO, China committed to free itself from the ‘House that Mao Built,’ including state-run enterprises [and] central planning institutes,” leading to “more institutions and associations free from Communist party control.” Nothing of the kind has happened. Instead of Communist China converging on Western liberal norms, Western technology has allowed the Chinese government to ratchet up surveillance of its citizens. It uses data mining made possible by US internet search engines, tracking features on smartphones, and the like to keep tabs on people’s movements and activities in the most invasive “social credit system” in the world. Dissidents are denied access to jobs, travel, and credit cards. With “Zero COVID” contact tracing and forcible house quarantining, the CCP under China’s increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, carried out population controls the KGB could only have dreamed of..."
********************
Although I felt it got off to a bit of a slow start, To Overthrow the World seemingly got better as it went. I have usually found this to be reversed. Typically, books start off with a bang, and then drag on as they progress.
I enjoyed the writing here in the last ~half of the book. It was quite a good summary of Communism in action in the 21st century. I would recommend this one.
4.5 stars
January 14, 2025
Very informative history of communism. My only criticism is the end of the epilogue when the author wanders into discussing recent and even ongoing events as analogous to historical communist excesses. Even if he ends up being correct, it cheapens the historical analysis of the rest of the book.
October 7, 2025
How can you trust a historian to be objective when he believes COVID mandates are communism?
I really wanted to like his book and there is a lot to like. Whenever I read a book giving a broad history of communism, I’m always careful when it’s a western writer because of the immense bias that pervades everything they present. Don’t get me wrong, I freaking hate communism and basically every communist authoritarian regime. I’m not one of those Leftist that accuses every criticism of communism as western propaganda. Nope—Lenin, Stalin and Mao were absolute murderous tyrants and it doesn’t matter whatever mental gymnastics a Leftist does to come up with historical revisions. I’m someone who reads both western and non-western critiques of communism and western societies so I came into this book with a fairly balanced view on the topic.
The book starts with a weird prologue about how communism is now on the rise and the author flirts with equating modern social democratic policies with communism so I was raising my eyebrows pretty quick. But then 90% of the book is disimpassioned review of the rise of communism with little editorialization and I really enjoyed it.
He traces the origins of anarchism and socialism from France, through the revolution with Babeuf and other thinkers into the 1830s. He goes over Marx and Engels and then Lenin and Stalin with the Bolsheviks and how they held one election in which they weren’t re-elected and then canceled elections forever. He spares no details about the Red Terror, the absolute tyranny of Lenin and Stalin. We get a nice review of all the contradictions with the Soviets using American made materials and plans to help their own economy. After the Soviet economy was in ashes 3 years after the revolution, Lenin quickly instituted state capitalism.
I didn’t know that Stalin first threw in with the KMT during the rise of Mao or that he supplied Franco with material before finally throwing in with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil war. Stalin did business with Hitler and even signed the famous non-aggression treaty that lasted about ten seconds. Stalin actually enjoyed global prestige in the 1920-30s while communism was on the rise. You’ll get a nice, but brief, review of operation Barbarossa and then all the communist reconstruction after WWII. There was brutal reconstruction in Czechoslovakia by Stalin with labor camps and the extension of the Gulag. Major retribution happened by Stalin to the countries that threw in with Hitler particularly Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Tito in Yugoslavia was basically a mini-Stalin rival. The author takes you through Beria and then perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union. The author also gives a brief overview of Mao, the idiotic famines that killed 40 million and then the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution and the surveillance state of the CCP that remains today.
Look, it’s not hard to find a historian who can catalogue all the atrocities of communist authoritarian regimes. The author does that and he does a good job at it.
Here’s where it gets wild: the epilogue. The author just couldn’t help himself and directly equates western COVID lock downs with communism. My jaw was on the floor with the logical fallacies that he craps out at the end of the book. Not only are these all false comparisons easy to tear apart, but it completely takes away the guy’s credibility from the entire book. Hey I’m sorry, but instituting social lock down measures in the face of a deadly airborne virus is NOT the same thing as a murderous authoritarian regime. How do I know how deadly the pandemic was? Because I’m a freaking ICU doctor and saw hundreds of people die because they didn’t follow the state recommended guidelines. Although the author’s Orwellian radar was going Defcon 5 because of lock downs and vaccine cards, what was the impact? Was it anything close to authoritarian surveillance and state inflicted atrocities? Yes, the economy crashed and inflation sky-rocketed. Was this a one off or was it global? (hint it was global). Did children suffer developmental harm from masks and being out of school. Probably. Was it on par with the murderous Stalin and Mao regimes? Of course not.
The author clearly has ideological blinders and what he fails to realize is that authoritarianism is not a respecter of ideologies. The US has been guilty of authoritarian rule through much of its history from slavery, Jim Crow, WWI and WWII domestic civil rights crackdown, Sedition and Espionage act, massive imperialism of North America, Guam, Philippines, American Samoa, Mexico, Panama and many more all without an ounce of "communism". If you want a glimpse into American authoritarianism just go ahead and look at the actual reason Eugene Debs was arrested and imprisoned, it's right out of the Soviet playbook. If this author were being objective, he’d see that authoritarianism comes from Western countries as well. How can I trust his entire analysis of communism if he can't differentiate between communist regimes, communist philosophy, communist economic theory, social democracy, democratic socialism and prudent public health policy during a deadly pandemic? How can I trust him when he fails to recognize that authoritarianism is NOT a feature unique to communist regimes?
Is it that he doesn't realize these topics deserve a nuanced discussion or that he doesn't even understand the nuance to begin with? Does he think the reader isn’t going to question his conclusions that he arrives at armed with logic as shallow as a Facebook right wing mean?
He should be embarrassed.
I don't think he's a western propagandist, I think he's a conservative propagandist and he didn't even try to hide it at the end.
I really wanted to like his book and there is a lot to like. Whenever I read a book giving a broad history of communism, I’m always careful when it’s a western writer because of the immense bias that pervades everything they present. Don’t get me wrong, I freaking hate communism and basically every communist authoritarian regime. I’m not one of those Leftist that accuses every criticism of communism as western propaganda. Nope—Lenin, Stalin and Mao were absolute murderous tyrants and it doesn’t matter whatever mental gymnastics a Leftist does to come up with historical revisions. I’m someone who reads both western and non-western critiques of communism and western societies so I came into this book with a fairly balanced view on the topic.
The book starts with a weird prologue about how communism is now on the rise and the author flirts with equating modern social democratic policies with communism so I was raising my eyebrows pretty quick. But then 90% of the book is disimpassioned review of the rise of communism with little editorialization and I really enjoyed it.
He traces the origins of anarchism and socialism from France, through the revolution with Babeuf and other thinkers into the 1830s. He goes over Marx and Engels and then Lenin and Stalin with the Bolsheviks and how they held one election in which they weren’t re-elected and then canceled elections forever. He spares no details about the Red Terror, the absolute tyranny of Lenin and Stalin. We get a nice review of all the contradictions with the Soviets using American made materials and plans to help their own economy. After the Soviet economy was in ashes 3 years after the revolution, Lenin quickly instituted state capitalism.
I didn’t know that Stalin first threw in with the KMT during the rise of Mao or that he supplied Franco with material before finally throwing in with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil war. Stalin did business with Hitler and even signed the famous non-aggression treaty that lasted about ten seconds. Stalin actually enjoyed global prestige in the 1920-30s while communism was on the rise. You’ll get a nice, but brief, review of operation Barbarossa and then all the communist reconstruction after WWII. There was brutal reconstruction in Czechoslovakia by Stalin with labor camps and the extension of the Gulag. Major retribution happened by Stalin to the countries that threw in with Hitler particularly Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Tito in Yugoslavia was basically a mini-Stalin rival. The author takes you through Beria and then perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union. The author also gives a brief overview of Mao, the idiotic famines that killed 40 million and then the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution and the surveillance state of the CCP that remains today.
Look, it’s not hard to find a historian who can catalogue all the atrocities of communist authoritarian regimes. The author does that and he does a good job at it.
Here’s where it gets wild: the epilogue. The author just couldn’t help himself and directly equates western COVID lock downs with communism. My jaw was on the floor with the logical fallacies that he craps out at the end of the book. Not only are these all false comparisons easy to tear apart, but it completely takes away the guy’s credibility from the entire book. Hey I’m sorry, but instituting social lock down measures in the face of a deadly airborne virus is NOT the same thing as a murderous authoritarian regime. How do I know how deadly the pandemic was? Because I’m a freaking ICU doctor and saw hundreds of people die because they didn’t follow the state recommended guidelines. Although the author’s Orwellian radar was going Defcon 5 because of lock downs and vaccine cards, what was the impact? Was it anything close to authoritarian surveillance and state inflicted atrocities? Yes, the economy crashed and inflation sky-rocketed. Was this a one off or was it global? (hint it was global). Did children suffer developmental harm from masks and being out of school. Probably. Was it on par with the murderous Stalin and Mao regimes? Of course not.
The author clearly has ideological blinders and what he fails to realize is that authoritarianism is not a respecter of ideologies. The US has been guilty of authoritarian rule through much of its history from slavery, Jim Crow, WWI and WWII domestic civil rights crackdown, Sedition and Espionage act, massive imperialism of North America, Guam, Philippines, American Samoa, Mexico, Panama and many more all without an ounce of "communism". If you want a glimpse into American authoritarianism just go ahead and look at the actual reason Eugene Debs was arrested and imprisoned, it's right out of the Soviet playbook. If this author were being objective, he’d see that authoritarianism comes from Western countries as well. How can I trust his entire analysis of communism if he can't differentiate between communist regimes, communist philosophy, communist economic theory, social democracy, democratic socialism and prudent public health policy during a deadly pandemic? How can I trust him when he fails to recognize that authoritarianism is NOT a feature unique to communist regimes?
Is it that he doesn't realize these topics deserve a nuanced discussion or that he doesn't even understand the nuance to begin with? Does he think the reader isn’t going to question his conclusions that he arrives at armed with logic as shallow as a Facebook right wing mean?
He should be embarrassed.
I don't think he's a western propagandist, I think he's a conservative propagandist and he didn't even try to hide it at the end.
October 29, 2025
Very well-researched and insightful read into communism as a political phenomenon. Relatively unbiased and well-argued, McMeekin lays out the events critical to communist successes and regime stability in the 20th century, yet not as the ideological destiny of a unified political front, but as a chaotic process of competing visions, political consolidation, state/nation-building, refinement, and violent purges.
The book does not shy away from demonstrating the human toll these processes entailed, from the extraction of slave labor in the early USSR/China to the horrors of Red Guard fanaticism and genocide in Cambodia.
Everything was very fine until the last half of the epilogue which deemed social media moderation, cancel culture, and Covid-19 lockdowns as importations of China and a sign of rising left authoritarianism in the West. Given everything presented in the rest of the book, this assertion is farcical, if not deeply offensive to genuine victims of Communist regimes. Comparing Canadian truckers angry about masks to masses of people who were dehumanized, exploited, and discarded like garbage while dragged along into an abstract future by intellectual leaders almost entirely alienated from the proletariat they claimed to represent and one that rarely lived up to its promises.
The book does not shy away from demonstrating the human toll these processes entailed, from the extraction of slave labor in the early USSR/China to the horrors of Red Guard fanaticism and genocide in Cambodia.
Everything was very fine until the last half of the epilogue which deemed social media moderation, cancel culture, and Covid-19 lockdowns as importations of China and a sign of rising left authoritarianism in the West. Given everything presented in the rest of the book, this assertion is farcical, if not deeply offensive to genuine victims of Communist regimes. Comparing Canadian truckers angry about masks to masses of people who were dehumanized, exploited, and discarded like garbage while dragged along into an abstract future by intellectual leaders almost entirely alienated from the proletariat they claimed to represent and one that rarely lived up to its promises.
January 7, 2025
Sean McMeekin's latest book purports to be a global history of communism, and indeed provides thorough coverage of its utopian origins, the fractious battles between hard-liners and reformists during the Second International, the birth of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and the blood-soaked reigns of Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Then it becomes decidedly uneven as the narrative reaches the Cold War era. There's plenty of bandwidth about Eastern Bloc sports doping, but very little about the Korean War and Prague Spring. Fidel Castro, a major Cold War figure by any reckoning, is dismissed as a Soviet puppet and his intervention in Angola is summarized in a few sentences. In fact, there's not much in here about "actually existing socialism" in places other than the Soviet Union and China.
His overall verdict of communism is deservedly scathing: despite their pretensions to speak for the working classes, communists only gained power through the gun, and once in power, lurched from one murderous disaster to another. He should have left the conclusion at that; unfortunately, he leans heavily into contemporary politics in the epilogue section by describing the COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates as examples of communism's pernicious afterlife (???) and, in the acknowledgements section, says he was inspired to write the book because of his frustration with the lockdowns. Other than the fact that Communist China implemented them (which I really doubt they did because of Marxist theory, since lots of other countries shut down their economies too), this strikes me as an especially dubious reach. Better to let communism's obvious failures speak for itself rather than tilt at windmills like this.
His overall verdict of communism is deservedly scathing: despite their pretensions to speak for the working classes, communists only gained power through the gun, and once in power, lurched from one murderous disaster to another. He should have left the conclusion at that; unfortunately, he leans heavily into contemporary politics in the epilogue section by describing the COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates as examples of communism's pernicious afterlife (???) and, in the acknowledgements section, says he was inspired to write the book because of his frustration with the lockdowns. Other than the fact that Communist China implemented them (which I really doubt they did because of Marxist theory, since lots of other countries shut down their economies too), this strikes me as an especially dubious reach. Better to let communism's obvious failures speak for itself rather than tilt at windmills like this.
October 18, 2024
I waffled over whether to rate this as 4 or 3 stars. It's a nicely detailed history, for the most part, but historically rather front-loaded and primarily focused on the Soviet Union and China (with occasional detours into the other Warsaw Pact satellites or the Khmer Rouge, for instance). For a book subtitled "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" it makes the very curious decision to essentially stop at the Tiananmen Square massacre; everything after that is compressed into the Epilogue, which spends as much time on discussion the post-Soviet Communism of Cuba or Vietnam as it does a weirdly paranoid segment complaining about Covid lockdowns and essentially projecting that the modern American progressive left will become equivalent with the Chinese Communist Party. It's a discordantly ideological note to end on, and gives short shrift to, really, what promised to be the feature that differentiated this book from your other standard history of the Soviet and Chinese Communist eras.
Perhaps I'm focusing too much on the "and Rise" in the subtitle, and expected something that the book never really promised (although the publisher's synopsis does seem to dwell on the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union). As a summative history of Communism from Marx up to the fall of the Soviet Union, the book is perfectly competent and a worthy piece of writing; if it was your first introduction to Communist history, I think you'd come away excellently informed. But in that sense it's not doing anything new, exactly, and I've read it all elsewhere. The post-Soviet political evolution of China is little touched on, but this too I have read elsewhere, so I feel the lack less; I was really hoping for more about the ongoing Communist (or not? the book does not elaborate) existence of the "lesser" Communist states of Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia (sort of), and Laos (North Korea, I know plenty about). Surely some ink could be spilled on these, actually Communist, places, rather than (or in addition to, to be fair) handwringing about whether the American left is going to harness social media to ape the Chinese social credit system.
Perhaps I'm focusing too much on the "and Rise" in the subtitle, and expected something that the book never really promised (although the publisher's synopsis does seem to dwell on the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union). As a summative history of Communism from Marx up to the fall of the Soviet Union, the book is perfectly competent and a worthy piece of writing; if it was your first introduction to Communist history, I think you'd come away excellently informed. But in that sense it's not doing anything new, exactly, and I've read it all elsewhere. The post-Soviet political evolution of China is little touched on, but this too I have read elsewhere, so I feel the lack less; I was really hoping for more about the ongoing Communist (or not? the book does not elaborate) existence of the "lesser" Communist states of Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia (sort of), and Laos (North Korea, I know plenty about). Surely some ink could be spilled on these, actually Communist, places, rather than (or in addition to, to be fair) handwringing about whether the American left is going to harness social media to ape the Chinese social credit system.
October 3, 2024
Unlike the cats grilled by the illegals invited by our rulers to invade once-decent towns all over America, Communism has nine lives, or more. Why is it that Communism, the most destructive and evil ideology in the history of mankind, always takes a licking and keeps on ticking? The short answer is that Communism is merely one branch of the Left tree, infinitely seductive because it appeals to our basest instincts, and until that tree is felled like Boniface’s oak, Communism and its siblings will continue their destruction. To arm ourselves to achieve that goal, it is very helpful to understand Communism. And there is no better way to gain this essential knowledge than with Sean McMeekin’s latest book.
To Overthrow the World is a compelling and competent survey of Communism. It even has the feel of a class in Communism, which is perhaps not surprising, given that McMeekin is a university professor, at Bard College. Unfortunately, however, I suspect it will not find the wide audience it deserves. Very few college students will read it, and none as assigned reading. Rather, those general readers who have read McMeekin’s other excellent books will read it. They should, and they will benefit, especially when they realize what I, at least, read as McMeekin’s purpose, about which he is not transparent, but he is deliberate—to use the history of Communism to warn us that far from dying in 1991, it has instead conquered much of the West.
What McMeekin first explores, however, is how Communism came to be so widespread in the twentieth century. Given that it was not “preordained by some Hegelian-Marxist law of history, however much Karl Marx and his acolytes would have wished it so,” what were the actual drivers of its spread? The very short answer is war—Communism, as seductive as its claims were, especially before the disasters created by it, only ever grabbed power as the result of grievous wounds in a country’s social fabric that were created by losing a war, often with the help of foreign Communist armies imposing the ideology on prostrate populations.
We begin with theory, Part I of the book. The iron core of Communist theory is the demand for forced total equality, material and social. McMeekin notes that this line of thought, as analysis if not as recommendation, traces back at least as far as Plato. In the ancient world, however, equality as a goal—moral, economic, social, or political—had zero traction. It was only with the rise of Christianity that the Christian doctrine of the equality of believers, that is, their equal standing before God combined with His demands for charity previously completely unknown in the ancient world, began to sometimes be twisted into demands for forced social and political equality among citizens, in a distortion of the Christian message. (In fact, Christianity has always condemned envy, the prime driver of demands for such undesirable equality.) And even so, only very rarely was this Christian heresy of political and social equality relevant to political action, most spectacularly in the brief sixteenth-century Anabaptist takeover of the German city of Münster.
But with the so-called Enlightenment, which secularized what Christians regarded as a future eschatological happening, forced equality became a present-day political demand, and one of formidable force, because it fed into and was fed by the powerful and universal human vice of envy. Rousseau was the most forward-thinking proponent of this line of thought, even if he was not quite yet a “full” Communist, because he allowed for private property, to the extent it did not frustrate the general will. Envy as the driving force of politics was reified in the French Revolution, which used terror in the name of the general will to accomplish equality, meaning the transfer of both tangible and intangible goods to those who had seized power (liberty and fraternity being made respectively secondary and irrelevant).
That nasty revolution was soon enough put down by more practical and reality-based men. Its ideas lived on, however, spreading like an underground fungus throughout every Western society. McMeekin profiles men such as François-Noël Babeuf, executed in 1797 for sedition, who fomented the “Conspiracy of Equals,” including publishing a manifesto which contained many elements of Karl Marx’s thought several decades later. Through the first half of the nineteenth century various eccentric men, such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, funded (unsuccessful) voluntary living arrangements focused on radical equality, but none of these involved or suggested seizing state power. The theory of Communism proper only began with Marx.
McMeekin offers a thorough précis of Marx’s life and works, including, most importantly, the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 (noting, in a choice turn of words, that Marx wrote “in the grand and wholly unsourced style of Hegelian history-writing”). Marx, a pithy, colorful, and original writer, if opaque in his longer works, offered ten condensed demands, an “astonishingly radical and authoritarian program,” all of which revolved around forcing equality upon the people of a nation. The Manifesto might not have gotten as much traction as it did, except for the wave of European revolutions that took place in 1848 (not inspired by the Manifesto, to be sure, but rather largely by nationalism, combined with Left ideology to some degree in some places). Those revolutions were put down, but Marx’s ideas lived on, and gave new nourishment to the Left at a time when change was in the air and the fool’s gold promised by the Enlightenment seemed real. Marx, an excellent organizer, himself established the First International, in 1864, to spread his new gospel, with definite, if mixed, success.
Communism was only one branch of the spreading Left fungus, which notably also included anarchism, exemplified by Mikhail Bakunin, and the syndicalism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The nineteenth-century Left was not a unity, certainly, even if their goals were the same at their core. For the past two hundred years, the twin trunks of the Left tree, what defines the Left, have been equality, the primary focus of the Communists, and emancipation from unchosen bonds, the secondary focus of the Communists, but the primary focus of other brands of Left thought. Bakunin, no fool, disliked the very obvious authoritarian streak in Marx’s thought, and saw clearly that Marx’s ideas meant not actual equality but rather a new ruling class, of intellectuals claiming to speak for the proletariat, which would be “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world.” Such splits among the Left are interesting to examine, because they may shed light on how to permanently defeat the Left—most obviously, through a strategy of divide and conquer, if enough will can be brought to bear.
This commonality among all Left efforts raises the obvious question—if under the hood the Left is the same in every way that matters, why does the Left historically fight endlessly over doctrine, purging from their sub-groupings those deemed heretics? The history of Communism, after all, is consumed in large part with such purges and quests for doctrinal purity, beginning very early in Marx’s career, and such splits also characterized the French revolutionaries of 1789. The easy answer is power—there is only so much power to go around, and men consumed by ideology strongly desire power, which can be achieved most certainly by welding men together with a common belief that can be contrasted to unbelievers, who can be consigned to the outer darkness. There is probably more to it, however, including offering sharply-defined meaning to the rootless through a personal belief that one has found the exact right path. The modern Left has, unfortunately, mostly overcome this problem, which was very damaging to the Left up until the supposed fall of Communism in the late twentieth century.
Back to history. Marx died in 1883, having dissolved the First International in 1876, because his doctrine was threatened with dilution, and he saw purity of doctrine as more important than immediate application. His heirs created the Second International, in 1889, excluding other Left groups, and they achieved considerable success in creating a united Communist movement across Western Europe. That success was ended with World War I, because most Communists chose nationalism over Communism. What rescued Communism was Vladimir Lenin, whose luck, combined with the chaos in Russia caused by the ultimate failure of Russian imperial system, created the first Communist state.
To achieve his ends, Lenin pushed “revolutionary defeatism,” the idea that only through manipulating a civil war could Communism be imposed on Russia (hence his famous line, “the worse, the better”). The best vehicle for this was to “turn the armies Red,” and that he proceeded to do with the Russians. (McMeekin is the author of a number of books about this period, including The Russian Revolution and a biography of Willy Münzenberg, an important German Communist.) The February Revolution of 1917, in which the Tsar abdicated, had no connection to Lenin’s efforts, but the chaos allowed Lenin, sent back to Russia by the Germans and funded with the modern equivalent of more than a billion dollars in gold, to execute his plans. Using various forms of propaganda, he succeeded in undermining Russian military morale, aiming to collapse the new government through military failure. Alexander Kerensky should have executed Lenin, but instead unwisely decided that he had no enemies on the Left, only on the Right, and the Bolsheviks seized total power in October.
All this is well-covered history. Part II, “Communism in Practice,” should also be well-covered history, but for most people today is largely obscure. This is not an accident, because covering up the ongoing crimes of Communism has been a main goal of Left historians for more than a century, a problem that has gotten worse over the past fifty years as the Left has excised from the history profession anyone who is not Left.
The Bolsheviks immediately embarked on a program of terror in pursuit of their aims. Confiscation of wealth and the usual random terror were the top items on the agenda, but those were quickly superseded by the need for mere survival against various enemies coalescing against their successful coup. In the first two months, the Bolsheviks killed fifteen thousand civilian “enemies of the people,” which as McMeekin notes was “more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed [after judicial process] in the century of tsarist rule before 1917.” But even after Germany collapsed in 1918 and could no longer fund Lenin (the gap was partially filled by millions of tons of food being sent by the American Relief Administration, run by Herbert Hoover), he was able to triumph over his enemies, including the White armies. Thus, the Bolsheviks were able to rule as they wished—forbidding private enterprise, abolishing money, dissolving the family and “bourgeois morality” through easy divorce and free abortion, and so forth, all as Marx had written.
What Lenin wanted most of all, and fully expected, was a wave of Communist triumph across Europe. At first, for a very brief moment, this appeared to be happening—for example, in Germany and in Hungary (where the 1919 Red Terror, led by Béla Kun, is something on which I am writing a long separate article). (Somewhat to my surprise, McMeekin does not mention the 1918 Finnish Civil War at all.) Very soon, however, all these Communist attempts to impose a Left regime outside of Russia failed completely, showing that even chaos and military defeat did not inevitably lead to Communist success. Nonetheless, Lenin pressed on, creating the Third International to coordinate Communist action across the globe, which the Soviet Union did through that vehicle for decades thereafter, forcing conformity among all the Communist parties of Europe (and America), notably by casting other left-wing parties as enemies no different than the “fascists” and purging any person not wholly subservient to Moscow (while also providing the carrot of funding from Moscow).
We then follow the ups and downs of Communism throughout the twentieth century, ranging from Lenin’s New Economic Policy to wave after wave of terror, inside and outside the Party. We touch on the Spanish Civil War and examine the run-up to World War II. In these years, Communism was not seen by Americans, or at least by those in charge of America, as a much of a threat, because the Left was generally in the ascendant. McMeekin notes that the “period of high Stalinism, c. 1928–1938, also marked a peak in Communist prestige internationally judged on almost any criterion.” Most useful to Stalin was Western fear of Adolf Hitler and a resurgent Germany; McMeekin wrote a whole book, Stalin’s War, about this, including the massive (and unvoted-on) support Franklin Roosevelt and his Communist-riddled administration shoveled onto Stalin’s plate, without any payment and without any attempt to require Stalin to stop killing his own people. McMeekin observes without comment that during the war, “the number of Red Army soldiers shot by their own side alone (about 300,000) . . . was more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.”
In postwar Europe, despite the devastation, Communism failed to win any power in a single free vote. Almost nobody wanted Communism when given a choice; the few that did had mostly been traitors for years (a phenomenon not confined to Europe; we had Alger Hiss and many others). But Communism still expanded, coterminous with the Red Army. All of Eastern Europe, and much of Central Europe, fell under Communist tyranny and terror. Millions were tortured, imprisoned, or killed, and often all three. I doubt if any of this is today covered in most schools and universities, except by specialists. McMeekin also offers a detailed examination of Communism’s postwar spread outside of Europe, greatly assisted by American fecklessness and by traitors, knowing and unknowing, within the American government, beginning with China and ending with Pol Pot.
The period of the greatest evils of European communism lasted until the late 1950s—that is, until a few years after the death of Stalin in 1953. Restive populations in Central Europe—first the Germans; then the Poles; and most spectacularly the Hungarians, gave vent to their hatred for Communism and the Communist systems that had been forced on them by the Red Army. (I am currently also writing a long piece on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, so this is very much on my mind.) At the same time, however, Communism expanded in the Third World, taking on various forms, but resulting in the terror and mass killing that nearly always accompanies any Left, Communist or other, ascension to total power. “It was in the years of the post-Tet slow-motion US disaster in Vietnam, from 1968 to 1975, that Soviet global influence and the popularity of the Communist cause likely peaked.” That influence and popularity had waned among intellectuals ever since Khrushchev denounced Stalin; Pol Pot’s genocidal mania in Cambodia turned general world opinion more sharply against Communism. (Although, interestingly, McMeekin correctly points out that one of the very few places where mass killing did not occur after a Communist takeover was—Vietnam. In fact the Vietnamese Communists were the ones who insisted on ending Pol Pot’s reign of terror, who had embarrassed his original sponsor, the Chinese.)
I will say in passing that this book could have used a better editor. Not in the writing, which as always with McMeekin is vivid and fluid. Rather, in double-checking the facts. For example, he says that the Soviet offensive against the Hungarians ending the 1956 Revolution cost the lives of “15,000 Soviet troops and advisors.” I knew this was false, so I checked the work footnoted (William Taubman’s Khrushchev). It says 1,500, ten times fewer. And even that is an overstatement (as is Taubman’s casual and uncited claim, also repeated by McMeekin, that 20,000 Hungarians were killed in the same offensive; actually, it was more like three or four thousand). A few other infelicities and errors occur, as well, but none are debilitating, just a bit jarring.
We then return to Eurasia, and the period of Communist sclerosis, the 1970s and 1980s. Competition was less in the military realm and more in (drug-fueled) athletic competition and in astroturfed propaganda campaigns in the West, such as the wholly Communist-funded “nuclear freeze” movement. Communist governments made much-needed money by “selling Germans and Jews”; that is, by selling exit permits for individuals in groups who had friends abroad who could pay for their release from Communism. Unrest reared its head intermittently, notably in Poland in the early 1980s, and was again restrained from the Soviet center, but without the violence of 1956. The Eastern Bloc fell ever further behind economically, and became perilously dependent on loans from the West (something well-covered in Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted). Nonetheless, the Soviets decided to invade Afghanistan to prop up their client regime in Kabul, even though Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB and later general secretary of the Party, who had also played a crucial role in 1956 in Hungary and was the best informed of the top Communists about the actual state of the world, warned against it. This was a mistake, not only because the Communists were unable to defeat the Afghans, but because the still-remaining not-inconsiderable attraction of Communism in the Third World, and in the West, painstakingly rebuilt for more than a decade, evaporated.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a true believer, something (contrary to myth) all the top Communists in the Eastern Bloc remained . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
To Overthrow the World is a compelling and competent survey of Communism. It even has the feel of a class in Communism, which is perhaps not surprising, given that McMeekin is a university professor, at Bard College. Unfortunately, however, I suspect it will not find the wide audience it deserves. Very few college students will read it, and none as assigned reading. Rather, those general readers who have read McMeekin’s other excellent books will read it. They should, and they will benefit, especially when they realize what I, at least, read as McMeekin’s purpose, about which he is not transparent, but he is deliberate—to use the history of Communism to warn us that far from dying in 1991, it has instead conquered much of the West.
What McMeekin first explores, however, is how Communism came to be so widespread in the twentieth century. Given that it was not “preordained by some Hegelian-Marxist law of history, however much Karl Marx and his acolytes would have wished it so,” what were the actual drivers of its spread? The very short answer is war—Communism, as seductive as its claims were, especially before the disasters created by it, only ever grabbed power as the result of grievous wounds in a country’s social fabric that were created by losing a war, often with the help of foreign Communist armies imposing the ideology on prostrate populations.
We begin with theory, Part I of the book. The iron core of Communist theory is the demand for forced total equality, material and social. McMeekin notes that this line of thought, as analysis if not as recommendation, traces back at least as far as Plato. In the ancient world, however, equality as a goal—moral, economic, social, or political—had zero traction. It was only with the rise of Christianity that the Christian doctrine of the equality of believers, that is, their equal standing before God combined with His demands for charity previously completely unknown in the ancient world, began to sometimes be twisted into demands for forced social and political equality among citizens, in a distortion of the Christian message. (In fact, Christianity has always condemned envy, the prime driver of demands for such undesirable equality.) And even so, only very rarely was this Christian heresy of political and social equality relevant to political action, most spectacularly in the brief sixteenth-century Anabaptist takeover of the German city of Münster.
But with the so-called Enlightenment, which secularized what Christians regarded as a future eschatological happening, forced equality became a present-day political demand, and one of formidable force, because it fed into and was fed by the powerful and universal human vice of envy. Rousseau was the most forward-thinking proponent of this line of thought, even if he was not quite yet a “full” Communist, because he allowed for private property, to the extent it did not frustrate the general will. Envy as the driving force of politics was reified in the French Revolution, which used terror in the name of the general will to accomplish equality, meaning the transfer of both tangible and intangible goods to those who had seized power (liberty and fraternity being made respectively secondary and irrelevant).
That nasty revolution was soon enough put down by more practical and reality-based men. Its ideas lived on, however, spreading like an underground fungus throughout every Western society. McMeekin profiles men such as François-Noël Babeuf, executed in 1797 for sedition, who fomented the “Conspiracy of Equals,” including publishing a manifesto which contained many elements of Karl Marx’s thought several decades later. Through the first half of the nineteenth century various eccentric men, such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, funded (unsuccessful) voluntary living arrangements focused on radical equality, but none of these involved or suggested seizing state power. The theory of Communism proper only began with Marx.
McMeekin offers a thorough précis of Marx’s life and works, including, most importantly, the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 (noting, in a choice turn of words, that Marx wrote “in the grand and wholly unsourced style of Hegelian history-writing”). Marx, a pithy, colorful, and original writer, if opaque in his longer works, offered ten condensed demands, an “astonishingly radical and authoritarian program,” all of which revolved around forcing equality upon the people of a nation. The Manifesto might not have gotten as much traction as it did, except for the wave of European revolutions that took place in 1848 (not inspired by the Manifesto, to be sure, but rather largely by nationalism, combined with Left ideology to some degree in some places). Those revolutions were put down, but Marx’s ideas lived on, and gave new nourishment to the Left at a time when change was in the air and the fool’s gold promised by the Enlightenment seemed real. Marx, an excellent organizer, himself established the First International, in 1864, to spread his new gospel, with definite, if mixed, success.
Communism was only one branch of the spreading Left fungus, which notably also included anarchism, exemplified by Mikhail Bakunin, and the syndicalism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The nineteenth-century Left was not a unity, certainly, even if their goals were the same at their core. For the past two hundred years, the twin trunks of the Left tree, what defines the Left, have been equality, the primary focus of the Communists, and emancipation from unchosen bonds, the secondary focus of the Communists, but the primary focus of other brands of Left thought. Bakunin, no fool, disliked the very obvious authoritarian streak in Marx’s thought, and saw clearly that Marx’s ideas meant not actual equality but rather a new ruling class, of intellectuals claiming to speak for the proletariat, which would be “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world.” Such splits among the Left are interesting to examine, because they may shed light on how to permanently defeat the Left—most obviously, through a strategy of divide and conquer, if enough will can be brought to bear.
This commonality among all Left efforts raises the obvious question—if under the hood the Left is the same in every way that matters, why does the Left historically fight endlessly over doctrine, purging from their sub-groupings those deemed heretics? The history of Communism, after all, is consumed in large part with such purges and quests for doctrinal purity, beginning very early in Marx’s career, and such splits also characterized the French revolutionaries of 1789. The easy answer is power—there is only so much power to go around, and men consumed by ideology strongly desire power, which can be achieved most certainly by welding men together with a common belief that can be contrasted to unbelievers, who can be consigned to the outer darkness. There is probably more to it, however, including offering sharply-defined meaning to the rootless through a personal belief that one has found the exact right path. The modern Left has, unfortunately, mostly overcome this problem, which was very damaging to the Left up until the supposed fall of Communism in the late twentieth century.
Back to history. Marx died in 1883, having dissolved the First International in 1876, because his doctrine was threatened with dilution, and he saw purity of doctrine as more important than immediate application. His heirs created the Second International, in 1889, excluding other Left groups, and they achieved considerable success in creating a united Communist movement across Western Europe. That success was ended with World War I, because most Communists chose nationalism over Communism. What rescued Communism was Vladimir Lenin, whose luck, combined with the chaos in Russia caused by the ultimate failure of Russian imperial system, created the first Communist state.
To achieve his ends, Lenin pushed “revolutionary defeatism,” the idea that only through manipulating a civil war could Communism be imposed on Russia (hence his famous line, “the worse, the better”). The best vehicle for this was to “turn the armies Red,” and that he proceeded to do with the Russians. (McMeekin is the author of a number of books about this period, including The Russian Revolution and a biography of Willy Münzenberg, an important German Communist.) The February Revolution of 1917, in which the Tsar abdicated, had no connection to Lenin’s efforts, but the chaos allowed Lenin, sent back to Russia by the Germans and funded with the modern equivalent of more than a billion dollars in gold, to execute his plans. Using various forms of propaganda, he succeeded in undermining Russian military morale, aiming to collapse the new government through military failure. Alexander Kerensky should have executed Lenin, but instead unwisely decided that he had no enemies on the Left, only on the Right, and the Bolsheviks seized total power in October.
All this is well-covered history. Part II, “Communism in Practice,” should also be well-covered history, but for most people today is largely obscure. This is not an accident, because covering up the ongoing crimes of Communism has been a main goal of Left historians for more than a century, a problem that has gotten worse over the past fifty years as the Left has excised from the history profession anyone who is not Left.
The Bolsheviks immediately embarked on a program of terror in pursuit of their aims. Confiscation of wealth and the usual random terror were the top items on the agenda, but those were quickly superseded by the need for mere survival against various enemies coalescing against their successful coup. In the first two months, the Bolsheviks killed fifteen thousand civilian “enemies of the people,” which as McMeekin notes was “more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed [after judicial process] in the century of tsarist rule before 1917.” But even after Germany collapsed in 1918 and could no longer fund Lenin (the gap was partially filled by millions of tons of food being sent by the American Relief Administration, run by Herbert Hoover), he was able to triumph over his enemies, including the White armies. Thus, the Bolsheviks were able to rule as they wished—forbidding private enterprise, abolishing money, dissolving the family and “bourgeois morality” through easy divorce and free abortion, and so forth, all as Marx had written.
What Lenin wanted most of all, and fully expected, was a wave of Communist triumph across Europe. At first, for a very brief moment, this appeared to be happening—for example, in Germany and in Hungary (where the 1919 Red Terror, led by Béla Kun, is something on which I am writing a long separate article). (Somewhat to my surprise, McMeekin does not mention the 1918 Finnish Civil War at all.) Very soon, however, all these Communist attempts to impose a Left regime outside of Russia failed completely, showing that even chaos and military defeat did not inevitably lead to Communist success. Nonetheless, Lenin pressed on, creating the Third International to coordinate Communist action across the globe, which the Soviet Union did through that vehicle for decades thereafter, forcing conformity among all the Communist parties of Europe (and America), notably by casting other left-wing parties as enemies no different than the “fascists” and purging any person not wholly subservient to Moscow (while also providing the carrot of funding from Moscow).
We then follow the ups and downs of Communism throughout the twentieth century, ranging from Lenin’s New Economic Policy to wave after wave of terror, inside and outside the Party. We touch on the Spanish Civil War and examine the run-up to World War II. In these years, Communism was not seen by Americans, or at least by those in charge of America, as a much of a threat, because the Left was generally in the ascendant. McMeekin notes that the “period of high Stalinism, c. 1928–1938, also marked a peak in Communist prestige internationally judged on almost any criterion.” Most useful to Stalin was Western fear of Adolf Hitler and a resurgent Germany; McMeekin wrote a whole book, Stalin’s War, about this, including the massive (and unvoted-on) support Franklin Roosevelt and his Communist-riddled administration shoveled onto Stalin’s plate, without any payment and without any attempt to require Stalin to stop killing his own people. McMeekin observes without comment that during the war, “the number of Red Army soldiers shot by their own side alone (about 300,000) . . . was more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.”
In postwar Europe, despite the devastation, Communism failed to win any power in a single free vote. Almost nobody wanted Communism when given a choice; the few that did had mostly been traitors for years (a phenomenon not confined to Europe; we had Alger Hiss and many others). But Communism still expanded, coterminous with the Red Army. All of Eastern Europe, and much of Central Europe, fell under Communist tyranny and terror. Millions were tortured, imprisoned, or killed, and often all three. I doubt if any of this is today covered in most schools and universities, except by specialists. McMeekin also offers a detailed examination of Communism’s postwar spread outside of Europe, greatly assisted by American fecklessness and by traitors, knowing and unknowing, within the American government, beginning with China and ending with Pol Pot.
The period of the greatest evils of European communism lasted until the late 1950s—that is, until a few years after the death of Stalin in 1953. Restive populations in Central Europe—first the Germans; then the Poles; and most spectacularly the Hungarians, gave vent to their hatred for Communism and the Communist systems that had been forced on them by the Red Army. (I am currently also writing a long piece on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, so this is very much on my mind.) At the same time, however, Communism expanded in the Third World, taking on various forms, but resulting in the terror and mass killing that nearly always accompanies any Left, Communist or other, ascension to total power. “It was in the years of the post-Tet slow-motion US disaster in Vietnam, from 1968 to 1975, that Soviet global influence and the popularity of the Communist cause likely peaked.” That influence and popularity had waned among intellectuals ever since Khrushchev denounced Stalin; Pol Pot’s genocidal mania in Cambodia turned general world opinion more sharply against Communism. (Although, interestingly, McMeekin correctly points out that one of the very few places where mass killing did not occur after a Communist takeover was—Vietnam. In fact the Vietnamese Communists were the ones who insisted on ending Pol Pot’s reign of terror, who had embarrassed his original sponsor, the Chinese.)
I will say in passing that this book could have used a better editor. Not in the writing, which as always with McMeekin is vivid and fluid. Rather, in double-checking the facts. For example, he says that the Soviet offensive against the Hungarians ending the 1956 Revolution cost the lives of “15,000 Soviet troops and advisors.” I knew this was false, so I checked the work footnoted (William Taubman’s Khrushchev). It says 1,500, ten times fewer. And even that is an overstatement (as is Taubman’s casual and uncited claim, also repeated by McMeekin, that 20,000 Hungarians were killed in the same offensive; actually, it was more like three or four thousand). A few other infelicities and errors occur, as well, but none are debilitating, just a bit jarring.
We then return to Eurasia, and the period of Communist sclerosis, the 1970s and 1980s. Competition was less in the military realm and more in (drug-fueled) athletic competition and in astroturfed propaganda campaigns in the West, such as the wholly Communist-funded “nuclear freeze” movement. Communist governments made much-needed money by “selling Germans and Jews”; that is, by selling exit permits for individuals in groups who had friends abroad who could pay for their release from Communism. Unrest reared its head intermittently, notably in Poland in the early 1980s, and was again restrained from the Soviet center, but without the violence of 1956. The Eastern Bloc fell ever further behind economically, and became perilously dependent on loans from the West (something well-covered in Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted). Nonetheless, the Soviets decided to invade Afghanistan to prop up their client regime in Kabul, even though Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB and later general secretary of the Party, who had also played a crucial role in 1956 in Hungary and was the best informed of the top Communists about the actual state of the world, warned against it. This was a mistake, not only because the Communists were unable to defeat the Afghans, but because the still-remaining not-inconsiderable attraction of Communism in the Third World, and in the West, painstakingly rebuilt for more than a decade, evaporated.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a true believer, something (contrary to myth) all the top Communists in the Eastern Bloc remained . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
February 27, 2025
In 1848, that year of revolutionary promise, Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. A mere 143 years later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved. How an ideology rose to dominate much of the world before largely collapsing is the subject of Sean McMeekin's new history.
McMeekin, who has a number of excellent books to his name, including Stalin's War: A New History of World War II and The Ottoman endgame. War, revolution, and the making of the modern Middle East, 1908-1923, is an ideal chronicler of communism. He treads lightly on history, writing informatively without regurgitating detail. The history of socialism is over allocated when it comes to committees, congresses and summits, but McMeekin avoids becoming bogged down. Likewise he restricts himself to as much Marist and Leninist theory as is required to understand what's going on, and no more.
His thesis is that communist revolution is destined to descent into violence. Communism writes checks it is incapable of cashing. It promises miracles and then is forced to use incredible violence in vain attempts to fulfil these promises.
Foremost among these promises is the economic liberation of the working classes from the servitude of wage labour where the larger share of the value they produce is taken by the capitalist. Yet far from providing an economic miracle communist societies (or rather governments) are almost always forced to return to capitalist economics. In the case of Lenin it was the New Economic Policy of the early 1920's, for Deng, it was the liberalisations after death of Mao. Unable to compete with the capitalist west, both the Soviet Union and Communist China dedicated significant resources to industrial espionage and set up factories to produce knock off western goods. Unable to make anything anyone else wanted to buy, Brezhnev's commitment to détente and Gorbachov's disengagement from Afghanistan was driven by their desire to access cheap American loans. to pay for badly needed imports.
Pilfering aside, attempts stave off capitalist economics, whilst sometimes farcical (For a time, Romania earned a living selling it's Jewish population and to Israel and it's German population to the West Germany), were often barbaric. The Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward were both attempts to reshape agriculture in a Marxist mould.
The violence required to compel these economic transformations was staggering, Lenin's Red Terror, Stalin's Great Purge, and Mao's Cultural Revolution were designed to remake society to fit the new economic order. In Cambodia the regime's societal engineering was so obscene that its communist neighbour, Vietnam, felt obliged to invade as an act of mercy.
Everywhere that a communist revolution arises the death squads quickly follow. The horrific violence in communist regimes isn't a bug, its a necessary feature.
If your communist regime does not go so far over the top that it is removed by your neighbour, then you will likely find yourself a decrepit autocracy. As McMeekin notes, by the 1970's the apparatchiks of the Politburo quoted Lenin, but only out of habit. There was nothing particularly socialist about Soviet society in the 1980's. Sure the young might be carted off to summer camps to learn about Engels and Bukharin, and the hospitals may have been slightly better, but otherwise it was no different to living under any militaristic strong man.
Where communism has survived it is either brutal enough to suppress descent but too inconvenient to remove (North Korea, Cuba) or has almost fully taken the clothes of capitalism (China, Vietnam). In both cases these countries present threats and challenges to the world, but exporting the communist revolution is not one of them.
McMeekin's scope is broad and he easily trots across the globe. The books subtitle is The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, and it is with the second 'rise' that he perhaps falls short. Communism still attracts the same young idealists it did in the 1930s. In the acknowledgements McMeekin suggests he regularly finds them in his own classes, yet outside the seminar room these ideas have little currency. Rather he sees echos of Soviet Communism in the decline in civil liberties in the West. He is rightly disturbed by the willingness of western societies to accept COVID lockdowns, and the use of technology by governments to restrict critics access to services and work (he mentions the Nigel Farage banking imbroglio as an example). Troubling yes, but none of these things are inherently communist. The current wave of populist authoritarianism comes mostly from the right. An increasing number of state actors may covert powers the KGB could only ever dream of, it doesn't mean they have taken the KGB's ideology.
Regardless, McMeekin has rendered a great service in reminding us of a simple fact: Communist governments failed because they inevitably come to provide their people not with socialism, but a pale imitation of capitalism. Marx was wrong about capitalist societies inevitably giving way to communist ones and the history of the 20th century is largely story of the incredible violence employed by those trying to prove him right.
McMeekin, who has a number of excellent books to his name, including Stalin's War: A New History of World War II and The Ottoman endgame. War, revolution, and the making of the modern Middle East, 1908-1923, is an ideal chronicler of communism. He treads lightly on history, writing informatively without regurgitating detail. The history of socialism is over allocated when it comes to committees, congresses and summits, but McMeekin avoids becoming bogged down. Likewise he restricts himself to as much Marist and Leninist theory as is required to understand what's going on, and no more.
His thesis is that communist revolution is destined to descent into violence. Communism writes checks it is incapable of cashing. It promises miracles and then is forced to use incredible violence in vain attempts to fulfil these promises.
Foremost among these promises is the economic liberation of the working classes from the servitude of wage labour where the larger share of the value they produce is taken by the capitalist. Yet far from providing an economic miracle communist societies (or rather governments) are almost always forced to return to capitalist economics. In the case of Lenin it was the New Economic Policy of the early 1920's, for Deng, it was the liberalisations after death of Mao. Unable to compete with the capitalist west, both the Soviet Union and Communist China dedicated significant resources to industrial espionage and set up factories to produce knock off western goods. Unable to make anything anyone else wanted to buy, Brezhnev's commitment to détente and Gorbachov's disengagement from Afghanistan was driven by their desire to access cheap American loans. to pay for badly needed imports.
Pilfering aside, attempts stave off capitalist economics, whilst sometimes farcical (For a time, Romania earned a living selling it's Jewish population and to Israel and it's German population to the West Germany), were often barbaric. The Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward were both attempts to reshape agriculture in a Marxist mould.
The violence required to compel these economic transformations was staggering, Lenin's Red Terror, Stalin's Great Purge, and Mao's Cultural Revolution were designed to remake society to fit the new economic order. In Cambodia the regime's societal engineering was so obscene that its communist neighbour, Vietnam, felt obliged to invade as an act of mercy.
Everywhere that a communist revolution arises the death squads quickly follow. The horrific violence in communist regimes isn't a bug, its a necessary feature.
If your communist regime does not go so far over the top that it is removed by your neighbour, then you will likely find yourself a decrepit autocracy. As McMeekin notes, by the 1970's the apparatchiks of the Politburo quoted Lenin, but only out of habit. There was nothing particularly socialist about Soviet society in the 1980's. Sure the young might be carted off to summer camps to learn about Engels and Bukharin, and the hospitals may have been slightly better, but otherwise it was no different to living under any militaristic strong man.
Where communism has survived it is either brutal enough to suppress descent but too inconvenient to remove (North Korea, Cuba) or has almost fully taken the clothes of capitalism (China, Vietnam). In both cases these countries present threats and challenges to the world, but exporting the communist revolution is not one of them.
McMeekin's scope is broad and he easily trots across the globe. The books subtitle is The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, and it is with the second 'rise' that he perhaps falls short. Communism still attracts the same young idealists it did in the 1930s. In the acknowledgements McMeekin suggests he regularly finds them in his own classes, yet outside the seminar room these ideas have little currency. Rather he sees echos of Soviet Communism in the decline in civil liberties in the West. He is rightly disturbed by the willingness of western societies to accept COVID lockdowns, and the use of technology by governments to restrict critics access to services and work (he mentions the Nigel Farage banking imbroglio as an example). Troubling yes, but none of these things are inherently communist. The current wave of populist authoritarianism comes mostly from the right. An increasing number of state actors may covert powers the KGB could only ever dream of, it doesn't mean they have taken the KGB's ideology.
Regardless, McMeekin has rendered a great service in reminding us of a simple fact: Communist governments failed because they inevitably come to provide their people not with socialism, but a pale imitation of capitalism. Marx was wrong about capitalist societies inevitably giving way to communist ones and the history of the 20th century is largely story of the incredible violence employed by those trying to prove him right.
December 27, 2024
I have mixed feelings about this book. The first half is just a rushed mess that leaps through events without taking a moment to actually settle in and explore anything with the requisite depth to understand it properly. The second half is a little more coherent, but still extremely rushed and threadbare, ending on a particularly discordant note about the author's libertarian view of how Covid was exaggerated and should've been handled in the West. All in all, it's engaging enough, but rushed to the point of being almost worthless as a history.
October 17, 2024
This book is exceptional. Lots of great stories about communism over the past 200 years; many aspects also coverd in McMeekin's other books (Stalin, the Russian Revolution, etc.) but the common thread of ideology ties everything together well here. Especially interesting reading about both the formation of the USSR (and very specific details like how the Kerensky to October Revolution to Civil War went, access to banks, NEP, etc.), and how it dissolved. Strongly recommend.
October 6, 2024
Communism, especially of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist variety, is still in the news today. More accurately: American political conservatives and reactionaries like to cast aspersions on their more liberal opponents by suggesting they are all dyed in the red Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communists. And there are some leftists who are proving more open to that prospect.
Sean McMeekin presents a history of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism in To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (galley received as part of early review program).
The author began with antecedents to Marx in the days of the French Revolution and immediately afterward. Much is then made of Marx, especially the contrast between his own middle-class bourgeoisie lifestyle intentionally and consciously divorced from the plight of the urban working class of mid-19th century Europe and the Hegelian philosophical prognostications Marx would set forth in all of his writings. The history of the first and second International were then presented. The rest of the history will in some way or another gravitate around the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the USSR: Lenin, then Stalin, attempts at spreading Communism overseas, the Second World War, the Eastern Bloc, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, and the disaster of the Khmer Rouge. The author ends with the divergent paths of Eastern Europe and China: the collapse of Communism in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and its entrenchment in China in the wake of Tienanmen Square.
In terms of the philosophy of Marxism/Communism, the work is strongest until it reaches the Russian Revolution; afterward it tends to record more historical events than much of anything about the philosophy. While the work does generally decently at considering the Marxism behind Lenin and Stalin and the development of the USSR, the work would be stronger by considering how much of Russian ideology was co-opted in the Leninist/Stalinist regime.
This work of historical exploration is by no means objective; the author’s hostility toward all things Communist remains quite palpable throughout. This is by no means a sympathetic consideration of Communism and its legacy.
Nevertheless, the work does well at demonstrating the inherent problems with Marx and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism which end up getting papered over in most forms of discourse. It’s important to see how disconnected Marx really was from the proletariat, and how nihilistic his desire for revolution and for wanton destruction would prove to be. It’s important to remember how poorly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism has played out in practice, leading to untold millions of deaths in the Eastern Bloc, USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, etc., and how much many of these regimes required Western support in getting propped up to survive.
It would be good for many political conservatives and reactionaries to consider this work and to see the rather large distance there is between the kinds of policies and purposes laid out by most in the Democratic Party and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communist revolutionary dogma and ideology. Likewise, it is good for political liberals to consider how no matter how well Marx’s critiques of capitalism might land, his whole Hegelian dialectical framework and lust for revolution were terribly misguided and should not at all be commended or emulated.
It is lamentable how impoverished our socio-political discourse has become if the only two options are full-throated Marxism or Gordon Gekko-style capitalism. Can our political and economic philosophical discourse not move well beyond the middle of the nineteenth century?
Sean McMeekin presents a history of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism in To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (galley received as part of early review program).
The author began with antecedents to Marx in the days of the French Revolution and immediately afterward. Much is then made of Marx, especially the contrast between his own middle-class bourgeoisie lifestyle intentionally and consciously divorced from the plight of the urban working class of mid-19th century Europe and the Hegelian philosophical prognostications Marx would set forth in all of his writings. The history of the first and second International were then presented. The rest of the history will in some way or another gravitate around the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the USSR: Lenin, then Stalin, attempts at spreading Communism overseas, the Second World War, the Eastern Bloc, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, and the disaster of the Khmer Rouge. The author ends with the divergent paths of Eastern Europe and China: the collapse of Communism in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and its entrenchment in China in the wake of Tienanmen Square.
In terms of the philosophy of Marxism/Communism, the work is strongest until it reaches the Russian Revolution; afterward it tends to record more historical events than much of anything about the philosophy. While the work does generally decently at considering the Marxism behind Lenin and Stalin and the development of the USSR, the work would be stronger by considering how much of Russian ideology was co-opted in the Leninist/Stalinist regime.
This work of historical exploration is by no means objective; the author’s hostility toward all things Communist remains quite palpable throughout. This is by no means a sympathetic consideration of Communism and its legacy.
Nevertheless, the work does well at demonstrating the inherent problems with Marx and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism which end up getting papered over in most forms of discourse. It’s important to see how disconnected Marx really was from the proletariat, and how nihilistic his desire for revolution and for wanton destruction would prove to be. It’s important to remember how poorly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism has played out in practice, leading to untold millions of deaths in the Eastern Bloc, USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, etc., and how much many of these regimes required Western support in getting propped up to survive.
It would be good for many political conservatives and reactionaries to consider this work and to see the rather large distance there is between the kinds of policies and purposes laid out by most in the Democratic Party and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communist revolutionary dogma and ideology. Likewise, it is good for political liberals to consider how no matter how well Marx’s critiques of capitalism might land, his whole Hegelian dialectical framework and lust for revolution were terribly misguided and should not at all be commended or emulated.
It is lamentable how impoverished our socio-political discourse has become if the only two options are full-throated Marxism or Gordon Gekko-style capitalism. Can our political and economic philosophical discourse not move well beyond the middle of the nineteenth century?
March 18, 2025
Communism is the scourge upon humanity that just won’t go away, a monstrous blight that has produced more death and suffering across the 20th Century into the 21st than any other ideology... far more than Hitler’s Third Reich, and still it is that Nazi regime that is unvaryingly condemned for mass deaths and misery inflicted on the world. Yet the numbers directly attributable to Communism are daunting - a scale of human suffering and death that is almost incomprehensible. This book is deeply disturbing - but compelling and necessary. Communism has not been generally acknowledged for its catastrophic and bloody record, a record far in excess of the justly condemned crimes of Hitler's NAZIs. To the contrary, it has been admired and covered up, excused, defended by too many in the free world who should know better, but do not. Too many apologists, too many relativists, too many uncritical believers - the truth about Communism must be understood.
McMeekin goes a long way towards rectifying that in his book, a history of Communism from early philosophical roots stemming from such as Rousseau to the original distillations of Marx and the subsequent interpretations and implementations of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, et al. Throughout is the unmistakable belief among Communists and their apologists that they can shape the perception of reality through rhetoric, and violence. Communist ideology assumes an aura of infallibility amongst its advocates similar to that which imbues Islamic ideology. There is always an enemy to blame, an external force antithetical to Communism, or an internal one subversive of it, that frustrates Communist goals and policies and that must be destroyed – literally – in order for Communism to flourish. The wonder is that so many, predominantly intelligent, affluent people to this day look upon Communism as a positive. The old canard that it just hasn’t been done correctly is still with us, too – although those who so argue never actually tell us what should be done differently. I do suspect that they somehow see themselves among the ruling class in any such “new” Communism, but then that is symptomatic of one of the many ineluctable flaws inherent to Communism, not least of which is that the proletariat that is to dictate never actually gets to do so. So much of Communist energy is devoted to trying to bring the proletariat up to snuff... and failing, for immutable reasons of human nature.
The book is comprehensive, but not pedantic or turgid – unlike the prose common with its subject matter. McMeekin writes in an engaging and comfortable manner – the book is as much a pleasure to read as it is informative and important. It is a perfect companion to his earlier book “Stalin's War: A New History of World War II” that puts Stalin and the Soviet WWII experience in long overdue perspective. That period – WWII and its precursor years, are undoubtedly a source of much of the fondness for Communism amongst our intelligentsia and idealists– sorely misplaced. McMeekin brilliantly, unequivocally, dispels the myths. When Hitler invaded Poland, Stalin invaded Poland – and then Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Yes – Soviet forces suffered immense casualties and were instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany ... but they also caused immense civilian casualties, and they shot 300,000 if their own soldiers for sundry infractions – more deaths than Britain’s troops suffered over the entirety of the war. Stalin actually enabled Hitler, providing the means for the bombs that were dropped on London in 1940-41. And so much more.
We have yet to fully account for the evils of Communism, nor to hold Communism to account, much less its supportive audience in the West. Fellow travelers, useful idiots, willfully ignorant advocates... Communism relies on them all, and they do not disappoint. McMeekin is an antidote. This is a must-read book!!
McMeekin goes a long way towards rectifying that in his book, a history of Communism from early philosophical roots stemming from such as Rousseau to the original distillations of Marx and the subsequent interpretations and implementations of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, et al. Throughout is the unmistakable belief among Communists and their apologists that they can shape the perception of reality through rhetoric, and violence. Communist ideology assumes an aura of infallibility amongst its advocates similar to that which imbues Islamic ideology. There is always an enemy to blame, an external force antithetical to Communism, or an internal one subversive of it, that frustrates Communist goals and policies and that must be destroyed – literally – in order for Communism to flourish. The wonder is that so many, predominantly intelligent, affluent people to this day look upon Communism as a positive. The old canard that it just hasn’t been done correctly is still with us, too – although those who so argue never actually tell us what should be done differently. I do suspect that they somehow see themselves among the ruling class in any such “new” Communism, but then that is symptomatic of one of the many ineluctable flaws inherent to Communism, not least of which is that the proletariat that is to dictate never actually gets to do so. So much of Communist energy is devoted to trying to bring the proletariat up to snuff... and failing, for immutable reasons of human nature.
The book is comprehensive, but not pedantic or turgid – unlike the prose common with its subject matter. McMeekin writes in an engaging and comfortable manner – the book is as much a pleasure to read as it is informative and important. It is a perfect companion to his earlier book “Stalin's War: A New History of World War II” that puts Stalin and the Soviet WWII experience in long overdue perspective. That period – WWII and its precursor years, are undoubtedly a source of much of the fondness for Communism amongst our intelligentsia and idealists– sorely misplaced. McMeekin brilliantly, unequivocally, dispels the myths. When Hitler invaded Poland, Stalin invaded Poland – and then Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Yes – Soviet forces suffered immense casualties and were instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany ... but they also caused immense civilian casualties, and they shot 300,000 if their own soldiers for sundry infractions – more deaths than Britain’s troops suffered over the entirety of the war. Stalin actually enabled Hitler, providing the means for the bombs that were dropped on London in 1940-41. And so much more.
We have yet to fully account for the evils of Communism, nor to hold Communism to account, much less its supportive audience in the West. Fellow travelers, useful idiots, willfully ignorant advocates... Communism relies on them all, and they do not disappoint. McMeekin is an antidote. This is a must-read book!!
January 2, 2025
In a speech delivered in May, 1993, economist Milton Friedman said, “It’s a funny thing. After the fall of Communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world, apparently, deduced from that, that what the West needed was more socialism.” Thirty years later, that sentiment is even more prevalent, as many people nowadays believe socialism and communism are superior political/ economic systems, and historic figures like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Castro, are champions of the common people.
This is why I’ve long thought that everyone who is curious about what communism is really like – and especially every college student who wears a Che T-shirt or idolizes Marx, Lenin, or Stalin – should read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. If that very thick, very dense book is too daunting, then they should read David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. But now, I have a third book to add to this list: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, by Sean McMeekin.
McMeekin’s history of Communism really is comprehensive, starting at the very beginning – before the beginning, actually. That is, the foundational underpinnings of Karl Marx’s philosophy are traced back from Socrates and Plato, up through the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The evolution of Marx’s thinking is traced, all within the context of the wider world of socialism, communism, anarchy, and other radical political/ economic creeds of the 19th century. The attempts to establish communism in other European countries before Russia is detailed, but of course a large portion of the book focuses on the Soviet Union, from Lenin and Trotsky through Stalin and Khrushchev, on up through Gorbachev and the dissolution of the USSR. Efforts to foment communism that fall outside military action are also described: economic, cultural, and in the arena of athletic competition. Also included are accounts of Communism’s attempts at finding footholds in other countries on all continents, with a detailed account of Mao and Communist China, and the effect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution on a Cambodian adherent of Maoism, “Pol Pot,” who tried to create the apotheosis of the Marxist ideal and slaughtered perhaps one-quarter to one-third of the country’s entire population in his attempt to establish his vision of a Communist paradise. And as its subtitle is “…the Rise and Fall and Rise…” the book (published in September, 2024) ends with the current machinations of Communist China, whose recent history in many ways mirrors that of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s.
To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism is an excellent one-volume summary of the history of communism, and should be read by everyone, from those who understand what a destructive, insidious philosophy it is, to those who do not.
This is why I’ve long thought that everyone who is curious about what communism is really like – and especially every college student who wears a Che T-shirt or idolizes Marx, Lenin, or Stalin – should read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. If that very thick, very dense book is too daunting, then they should read David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. But now, I have a third book to add to this list: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, by Sean McMeekin.
McMeekin’s history of Communism really is comprehensive, starting at the very beginning – before the beginning, actually. That is, the foundational underpinnings of Karl Marx’s philosophy are traced back from Socrates and Plato, up through the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The evolution of Marx’s thinking is traced, all within the context of the wider world of socialism, communism, anarchy, and other radical political/ economic creeds of the 19th century. The attempts to establish communism in other European countries before Russia is detailed, but of course a large portion of the book focuses on the Soviet Union, from Lenin and Trotsky through Stalin and Khrushchev, on up through Gorbachev and the dissolution of the USSR. Efforts to foment communism that fall outside military action are also described: economic, cultural, and in the arena of athletic competition. Also included are accounts of Communism’s attempts at finding footholds in other countries on all continents, with a detailed account of Mao and Communist China, and the effect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution on a Cambodian adherent of Maoism, “Pol Pot,” who tried to create the apotheosis of the Marxist ideal and slaughtered perhaps one-quarter to one-third of the country’s entire population in his attempt to establish his vision of a Communist paradise. And as its subtitle is “…the Rise and Fall and Rise…” the book (published in September, 2024) ends with the current machinations of Communist China, whose recent history in many ways mirrors that of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s.
To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism is an excellent one-volume summary of the history of communism, and should be read by everyone, from those who understand what a destructive, insidious philosophy it is, to those who do not.
December 17, 2025
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November 24, 2025
Sean McMeekin has an unmatched ability to take subjects we think we understand and reveal just how much of the story we’ve missed. To Overthrow the World is no exception. It’s sweeping without being bloated, deeply sourced without ever feeling academic for its own sake, and unflinching in laying out the human and geopolitical cost of a century of revolutionary ideology.
What makes this book extraordinary is the clarity. McMeekin doesn’t fall into the lazy moral equivalence or romanticism that often infects writing about communism. He treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves—showing how radical movements spread, why they captured state power, and how they left a trail of devastation from Europe to Asia to the developing world. And he does it with an eye for detail that turns global history into a gripping narrative.
Every chapter offers a moment that forces you to stop and rethink what you thought you knew. McMeekin connects events across continents in a way that makes the global rise of communism feel both inevitable and tragically preventable.
The end of the book is where his analysis becomes genuinely urgent. McMeekin draws a straight, uncomfortable line from 20th-century revolutionary ideology to the modern resurgence of state-driven control—mass coordination, technocratic certainty, and the suppression of dissent. In light of the authoritarian reflexes displayed by governments during and after the Covid era, his warnings land with even more force. It’s a reminder that centralized power doesn’t disappear; it adapts.
I genuinely believe this should be required reading—for students, for adults, for anyone trying to understand the 20th century or the world we live in now. Few historians write with this level of rigor and readability. Even fewer can illuminate ideological history with this degree of moral clarity.
If you care about history, politics, or simply understanding how the modern world took shape, read this book
What makes this book extraordinary is the clarity. McMeekin doesn’t fall into the lazy moral equivalence or romanticism that often infects writing about communism. He treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves—showing how radical movements spread, why they captured state power, and how they left a trail of devastation from Europe to Asia to the developing world. And he does it with an eye for detail that turns global history into a gripping narrative.
Every chapter offers a moment that forces you to stop and rethink what you thought you knew. McMeekin connects events across continents in a way that makes the global rise of communism feel both inevitable and tragically preventable.
The end of the book is where his analysis becomes genuinely urgent. McMeekin draws a straight, uncomfortable line from 20th-century revolutionary ideology to the modern resurgence of state-driven control—mass coordination, technocratic certainty, and the suppression of dissent. In light of the authoritarian reflexes displayed by governments during and after the Covid era, his warnings land with even more force. It’s a reminder that centralized power doesn’t disappear; it adapts.
I genuinely believe this should be required reading—for students, for adults, for anyone trying to understand the 20th century or the world we live in now. Few historians write with this level of rigor and readability. Even fewer can illuminate ideological history with this degree of moral clarity.
If you care about history, politics, or simply understanding how the modern world took shape, read this book
December 26, 2024
Such a weird book. It gives an in-depth and thorough recount of the workings of communist regimes, but it does so without actually linking those regimes philosophically to communism. In fact it acknowledges the wealth of communist thinkers competing with the Bolsheviks at the outset, but notes how Lenin and his crew effectively stamped those out in the wake of WWI. So it's only tangentially about communism, really, and much more focused on totalitarian regimes masquerading as communist. In fact it specifically highlights how at no point were any of these regimes completely independent of private industry.
It's hard subject matter to remain objective on - I don't think many would care to defend the purges of Stalin and Mao - but there's a thread of triumphalism that doesn't seem entirely appropriate from someone described as an academic. The epilogue just gets strange - there's commentary on Western regimes caving on face-masks during the initial COVID outbreaks, and downplaying of Putin's ongoing propaganda war against the West, when Western intelligence agencies and cybersecurity forms are pretty unanimous in their accusations of such. It's odd, then, that McMeekin doesn't look at Putin through that same critical lens. In terms of consolidation of power, crushing of dissent, and enthusiastic use of violence, Putin seems like a natural extension of Russia's communist strongmen. But then I guess you couldn't call it a fall of communism if it's still underway.
It's an interesting history read, but fundamentally flawed.
It's hard subject matter to remain objective on - I don't think many would care to defend the purges of Stalin and Mao - but there's a thread of triumphalism that doesn't seem entirely appropriate from someone described as an academic. The epilogue just gets strange - there's commentary on Western regimes caving on face-masks during the initial COVID outbreaks, and downplaying of Putin's ongoing propaganda war against the West, when Western intelligence agencies and cybersecurity forms are pretty unanimous in their accusations of such. It's odd, then, that McMeekin doesn't look at Putin through that same critical lens. In terms of consolidation of power, crushing of dissent, and enthusiastic use of violence, Putin seems like a natural extension of Russia's communist strongmen. But then I guess you couldn't call it a fall of communism if it's still underway.
It's an interesting history read, but fundamentally flawed.
February 5, 2025
(I listened to the audiobook version of this book.)
I enjoyed this book, and I think the audiobook allows more to sink in. (S/O Robert Fass!) Approachable and coherent for such a big topic. This book does not make a lot of explicit arguments about the politics or philosophy of communism, but there will be jabs and swipes. And there isn't a lot of navel-gazing or wondering about What-Ifs that a book like this could get terminally lost in.
The book wades through all the terror brought on by communist regimes - primarily the Soviets and Chinese. Honestly, the book loses its way and becomes a catalog of atrocities, and I had a hard time seeing how all of this is the DIRECT result of a socio-economic philosophy. Strip away the modern aesthetic, and we're back in antiquity - comfortably pillaging, murdering, and oppressing.
You've got to hang in there until the end of Chapter 13 for McMeekin to flat-out say it.
If you're coming to this book looking for ammo to argue against Communism, McMeekin has done you a real service. Buy two copies and write him a thank-you. If you're from the other camp, you've got some homework to do. You'll be thinking, "But what about XYZ?" for a lot of this book. Take notes and chase your hunches.
The book is a worthwhile read and serves up a lot of food for thought.
I enjoyed this book, and I think the audiobook allows more to sink in. (S/O Robert Fass!) Approachable and coherent for such a big topic. This book does not make a lot of explicit arguments about the politics or philosophy of communism, but there will be jabs and swipes. And there isn't a lot of navel-gazing or wondering about What-Ifs that a book like this could get terminally lost in.
The book wades through all the terror brought on by communist regimes - primarily the Soviets and Chinese. Honestly, the book loses its way and becomes a catalog of atrocities, and I had a hard time seeing how all of this is the DIRECT result of a socio-economic philosophy. Strip away the modern aesthetic, and we're back in antiquity - comfortably pillaging, murdering, and oppressing.
You've got to hang in there until the end of Chapter 13 for McMeekin to flat-out say it.
If you're coming to this book looking for ammo to argue against Communism, McMeekin has done you a real service. Buy two copies and write him a thank-you. If you're from the other camp, you've got some homework to do. You'll be thinking, "But what about XYZ?" for a lot of this book. Take notes and chase your hunches.
The book is a worthwhile read and serves up a lot of food for thought.
August 7, 2025
Subtitled The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, going in I was most interested to hear McMeekin’s take on that last “Rise”. I felt broadly familiar with the first “Rise” and the “Fall”. Alas, only a few pages were devoted to that in the epilogue. However, that is not to say I didn’t find value in this book overall.
McMeekin traces the history of communism, starting with Marx’s Hegelian influences, to Marx himself, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, late-Soviet leaders, branching out to its impact through the years in the capitalist West, and its larger impact on places like Cuba, Vietnam, and other Asian countries. Before finally wrapping up with Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the CCP as a world power.
A lot of ground to cover, but McMeekin performs admirably. At the end of the day this book could almost serve as a reference work for distinct periods of world history. McMeekin does astonishingly well packing the Russian Revolution into one chapter. Similarly for Stalinism, Maoism, and still more.
I will caution though that this is not an easy read. The history of communism is bloody and brutal. This is not for the faint of heart. But I do believe if anyone wishes to stick up for communism or even Marxism today, they need to be able to answer to what is accounted for here.
McMeekin traces the history of communism, starting with Marx’s Hegelian influences, to Marx himself, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, late-Soviet leaders, branching out to its impact through the years in the capitalist West, and its larger impact on places like Cuba, Vietnam, and other Asian countries. Before finally wrapping up with Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the CCP as a world power.
A lot of ground to cover, but McMeekin performs admirably. At the end of the day this book could almost serve as a reference work for distinct periods of world history. McMeekin does astonishingly well packing the Russian Revolution into one chapter. Similarly for Stalinism, Maoism, and still more.
I will caution though that this is not an easy read. The history of communism is bloody and brutal. This is not for the faint of heart. But I do believe if anyone wishes to stick up for communism or even Marxism today, they need to be able to answer to what is accounted for here.
August 20, 2025
A very good history of Communism. Could have been titled "Everything you ever wanted to know about Communism". This is a very high level overview of just about every Communist country and movement since the 19th century. If the author has forgotten or skipped one I can't think of it. There is a wealth of information. One might wish the author had written an entire book on some of the chapters. I would encourage anyone who wants a excellent general history of Communism to read this.
The only real complaint about the book is that parts of it feel "rushed". By that I mean facts are sometimes given out of chronological order. This detracts, for me anyway, from the point the author is making. It gives me a feeling of someone trying to get something out quickly and not taking a little more time. For example, on page 231, the author says Franco paid Spanish gold to the Soviets when it was the Republicans not the Nationalists. I'm sure a cursory proof reading would have caught that.
Given the resurgent interest in Communism, as an antidote to the perceived failures of capitalism, this is a perfect book to read. The last line in the book is a prescient statement.
"Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started."
The only real complaint about the book is that parts of it feel "rushed". By that I mean facts are sometimes given out of chronological order. This detracts, for me anyway, from the point the author is making. It gives me a feeling of someone trying to get something out quickly and not taking a little more time. For example, on page 231, the author says Franco paid Spanish gold to the Soviets when it was the Republicans not the Nationalists. I'm sure a cursory proof reading would have caught that.
Given the resurgent interest in Communism, as an antidote to the perceived failures of capitalism, this is a perfect book to read. The last line in the book is a prescient statement.
"Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started."
December 5, 2025
A sweeping history of communism from its earliest beginnings as the mental gymnastics of 18th-c French and German middle-class intellectuals, to the murderous totalitarian states of the 20th century, down to the globalist turd that won’t flush that it is today.
The book includes loads of horrific details on the crimes of the evil, Godless regimes of the 20th century and their unfortunate victims (who were mostly their own people). Communism professes to champion the common man, but instead it is brutally pushed on him by over-educated elites. It can only come to power by force and remain in power by force, propped up by “capitalist” money. Only God knows how much of western democracies’ tax payer money has been spent to help these dictators torture and murder their own citizens and those of their next door neighbours. Most people think that communism ended with the Cold War but in fact it is all around us today albeit in more subtle forms.
Audiobook. Well produced and the narrator was good. The book is very densely packed with political details. It has so many long sentences that begin with subordinate clauses that it’s sometimes easy to lose the thread.
The book includes loads of horrific details on the crimes of the evil, Godless regimes of the 20th century and their unfortunate victims (who were mostly their own people). Communism professes to champion the common man, but instead it is brutally pushed on him by over-educated elites. It can only come to power by force and remain in power by force, propped up by “capitalist” money. Only God knows how much of western democracies’ tax payer money has been spent to help these dictators torture and murder their own citizens and those of their next door neighbours. Most people think that communism ended with the Cold War but in fact it is all around us today albeit in more subtle forms.
Audiobook. Well produced and the narrator was good. The book is very densely packed with political details. It has so many long sentences that begin with subordinate clauses that it’s sometimes easy to lose the thread.
August 4, 2025
Pretty solid overview of communism. Definitely a good place to start when it comes to soviet history and all the shitty states that fell because of communism and not whatever bullshit the marxists blame. It is certainly biased at points but nothing egregious.
I did find the book slightly misleading though. I thought it was going to cover the marxist infestation of universities maybe even doing a bit of internet history to cover Breadtube as the title implies yet the second rise of communism only gets like 3 pages in the epilogue. I can't really agree either that communism is rising in the west at least in the way McMeekin thinks it is. The CCP is only nominally communist and so what McMeekin cites as Chinese imports in terms of politics have really been a result of creeping statism which has been active for over a century. The way communism is truly rising in the west is due to communist indoctrination in the universities as well as champagne socialists online such as Hasan Piker and Second Thought brainwashing our children.
7/10-flawed but informative
I did find the book slightly misleading though. I thought it was going to cover the marxist infestation of universities maybe even doing a bit of internet history to cover Breadtube as the title implies yet the second rise of communism only gets like 3 pages in the epilogue. I can't really agree either that communism is rising in the west at least in the way McMeekin thinks it is. The CCP is only nominally communist and so what McMeekin cites as Chinese imports in terms of politics have really been a result of creeping statism which has been active for over a century. The way communism is truly rising in the west is due to communist indoctrination in the universities as well as champagne socialists online such as Hasan Piker and Second Thought brainwashing our children.
7/10-flawed but informative
May 19, 2025
(audiobook) A tad dry, if anything. It seemed fairly thorough and exhaustive as far as historical accounts of Communism's rise and spread go. Near the end I realized that what loomed large in my mind ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall") had been well glossed over by the author. Not necessarily a problem, just something I noticed.
Unsure what else to say except for just how depressing this is. Much like The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts, the only way to read it is with this mounting sense of despair over everyone's seeming inability to stop the rolling destruction of the regimes that began with the Soviet Union.
Unsure what else to say except for just how depressing this is. Much like The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts, the only way to read it is with this mounting sense of despair over everyone's seeming inability to stop the rolling destruction of the regimes that began with the Soviet Union.
February 19, 2025
Upsides: The book is highly readable, not overly dense, and packed with historical anecdotes.
Downsides: It feels rushed toward the end and doesn’t fully explore the “second rise of communism” mentioned in the title—only the epilogue is devoted to it. I expected some discussion of how communist ideology itself has evolved, but the author instead focuses on the rise of authoritarianism to illustrate that communism is not, in fact, dead. However, does this mean the idea of communism endures? From my perspective, it doesn’t seem that way.
What the book demonstrates—by focusing on the geopolitics of the latter half of the 20th century rather than examining the evolution of Marx’s original concept—is that the ideological foundation of communism remains rooted in an era defined by 12-hour workdays, steam engines, and unchecked monopolies.
Downsides: It feels rushed toward the end and doesn’t fully explore the “second rise of communism” mentioned in the title—only the epilogue is devoted to it. I expected some discussion of how communist ideology itself has evolved, but the author instead focuses on the rise of authoritarianism to illustrate that communism is not, in fact, dead. However, does this mean the idea of communism endures? From my perspective, it doesn’t seem that way.
What the book demonstrates—by focusing on the geopolitics of the latter half of the 20th century rather than examining the evolution of Marx’s original concept—is that the ideological foundation of communism remains rooted in an era defined by 12-hour workdays, steam engines, and unchecked monopolies.
March 9, 2025
The Black Book of Communism part 2. This book mainly highlights the negative aspects of communism in the Soviet Union and China, and to a lesser extent Cambodia and Eastern Europe. To be sure, in practice, there were many atrocities committed by communist regimes. However, this historian ignores any positive impacts of communism or socialism in assisting decolonization in Africa and Asia, and is highly sympathetic to pro-US cold war narratives. The treatment of Chile 1970-1973 and the Cuban Revolution were particularly disappointing and one-sided. I guess I could have looked up the author before reading this book, and once I started it I wanted to just finish it. There's no doubt that there is plenty to criticize about communist regimes of the 20th century, but there are more balanced books out there.
February 17, 2025
This is a rather detailed history of Communism from long before it actually took root until the present day. It is interesting how a mostly bum Marx came up with this concept then it was actually implemented by Lenin. The author discusses the truly horrific abuses of the ordinary people of Communist countries by their rulers in the drive for power. What a sickening episode of history.
It does seem the author is biased against this form of government but that is hardly a criticism. The book is fairly intense and difficult to read in places because of all the names and things going on which can make things confusing.
It does seem the author is biased against this form of government but that is hardly a criticism. The book is fairly intense and difficult to read in places because of all the names and things going on which can make things confusing.
December 14, 2025
A sweeping and ambitious history that tackles Communism as both an idea and a lived political reality. McMeekin moves confidently from Marx’s original theories through the Soviet and Chinese experiences and into the modern world, making complex history accessible without oversimplifying it. What stood out most is the book’s global scope and its clear argument about how Communist systems have come to power and sustained themselves over time. While readers may debate some of McMeekin’s conclusions, the scholarship is thorough and the narrative consistently engaging. A provocative, well-researched read for anyone interested in modern political history and ideological movements.
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