To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism

by Sean McMeekin, Robert Fass (Narrator)

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. 

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Economics, Social Justice, World History

Audible Audio

First published September 10, 2024

About the 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.

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.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Cav · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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:

"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

[Dennis R · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Wick Welker · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 because... where is all this alleged communism on the rise? 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.

[Baxter Speed · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Simms · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Alex Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[snpefk]

Для америкосов, которые коммунистов только в Red Alert видели, сойдёт, а для людей с постсоветским бэкграундом тут ловить нечего (такое нельзя выдумать – такое можно только пережить). Не надо быть чрезвычайно прозорливым человеком, чтобы догадаться, что это скорее обзорная или вводная книга для людей, которые вдохновились лозунгами «eat the rich» и решили, что учение Карл Маркс и Фридрих Энгельс звучит хайпово.

За ~500 с чем-то страниц тему, в принципе, можно было развить, но это по большей части историческая работа, а не экономическая, философская или социальная, с чем и связано моё глубокое разочарование.

Тут по каждой отдельной теме люди книги пишут, у Бушвакера трёхчасовой стрим про «Большой китайский скачок», а здесь мы начинаем с Французской революции и протосоциалистов, потом Маркс и Энгельс, большевики, Восточный блок, Китай, красные кхмеры (кстати, статья на Лурке про Пол Пот была не менее интересная, чем тут, царствие ей небесное), Вьетнам, Ельцин и Горбачёв. Вроде никого не забыл.

(Мне, конечно, интересно было про Восточный блок узнать, но по кругу ходить не хочется, я это уже в абзаце выше расписал описал)

Т.е. это ОК вводная книга для самых маленьких, но она отчаянно страдает от отсутствия каких-либо попыток анализа, почему доктрина не работала. С другой стороны, тебе и не нужно распинаться, почему коммунизм не работает, если просто перечислить каждую его имплементацию (смешная картинка _мужик_бьет_себя_по_виску.жпег_)

[Michael Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

McMeekin has written an extensive history of communism that will serve modern readers well. He shows the terrors and failures of communism, along with how the idea began. Well written history.

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 2 out of 5]

A general run down of the basics of the history of communism as it is allowed to be discussed in the modern age. I found the tone to be less than critical of the subject and regardless of the author's intentions, the restriction of criticism of such movements by the publishing companies heightens suspicion.
Outside of that it is a basic history of communism, not particularly detailed on any one location or branch.

[Christiana Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice update of recent scholarship around the history of communism based on archives that until recently were unavailable. Overall, it was a well-balanced, reasonably thorough overview. I did find the last section on the recent rise of communism after the fall of the Soviet Union to be lacking… it failed to address rising popularity of ideas and recent actions of communist countries and instead focused on methods of societal control the author links to communist practices (like surveillance and lockdown). On the other hand, the rest of the book had a strong balance of early and evolving communist theory with historical narrative of events. I particularly appreciated the sections addressing communism in Asia, which is often overshadowed by the history of communism in Eastern European counties.

[Timothy Bergman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raise the red flag, then put it down again.
There's a lot to like about this book, but it's ambition holds it back. McMeekin tries to give an overview to all the state that advocated for communism as their end goal, but does not give enough information to satisfy more than the basic necessities. I get it, it's a agonizingly wide topic. I suspect trying to write the history of democracies up to the present day would be about the same. But still, did McMeekin really need to spend so much time on sports controversies in the Olympics? It added so little it might have been two sentences at most, not pages.
Moreover, McMeekin skips the plethora of communist movements outside of the Eastern Bloc and China. No Shining Path in Peru, no Weather Underground in America or any other of the dozens of Stalin wannabees funded or spurned by the KGB who supplied funding. I didn't expect this book to be so myopic when it came to the subject of communism. I would have liked it to go into more detail about Africa, South America, the failures of communist revolutionaries, why some found success like in Nepal.
Long story short, I walked away from this book unsatisfied. McMeekin had a large job to do, and I'm sure for those getting started he did it well, but I wanted more than I got. I still love his works on Russia, and I hope he continues to write more after this.

[Benjamin Greenwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

To Overthrow the World thoroughly details the development of communism beginning with its intellectual inception in post revolution Paris all the way through the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Maoist China. McMeekin tells of the tragic consequences of communism. As communism progressed over the years its consequences remained the same. This book leads its reader to conclude that never have the governing policies of a communist regime produced for its citizens greater freedom or quality of life than that which is found in free market capitalist societies.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.]

[Nick Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[David Brush · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[LENGDUNG TUNGCHAMMA · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I started this book, I felt like the author was too sympathetic to communism. When I got to the end, I thought he was too harsh on it. I suppose that means it is a good book. A book that makes you think, that shifts how you feel about something as you move through it, is doing exactly what a serious work of history should do.

I picked this book up after reading the magnum opus biography of Che by Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. While reading that book, I kept asking myself what communism really was. Not the caricature. Not the cold war bumper sticker. I already had the surface knowledge. What I wanted was depth. I wanted to trace the historical evolution of the idea, to understand its intellectual origins, its practice across different countries and contexts, and ultimately its results. I was tired of the usual right-wing trope that reduces it to gulags and breadlines and leaves it there. I wanted something serious and rigorous. This book did not disappoint.

It traces communism from its ancient philosophical roots all the way into the 21st century, but the heart of the book is Marx. Karl Marx the man, the thinker, the exile sitting in the British Museum reading room for years, building a system of thought that would reshape the world. The author does an extraordinary job of showing the forces that shaped Marx's thinking. The industrial misery of 19th century Europe, where factory workers in Manchester were working 14-hour days for wages that kept them permanently on the edge of starvation. The philosophical inheritance of Hegel. The friendship and financial lifeline of Engels, without whom Marx might have starved before finishing Das Kapital. The book makes you understand that Marxism did not arrive from nowhere. It was a rational, if ultimately flawed, response to conditions that were genuinely barbaric.

Then the book follows the idea into the world. The Paris Commune of 1871, the first serious attempt to govern a major city along communist lines, lasted 72 days before it was drowned in blood. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Communards were killed in the final week alone, a figure that shocked even some of the conservative governments watching from outside France. It was the first proof of a pattern the book returns to repeatedly.
Revolutionary experiments ending not in liberation but in slaughter, often of the very people the revolution claimed to be for.

Then comes the Russian Revolution, Lenin, and the machinery of the Soviet state. Then Stalin, and here the numbers become almost impossible to absorb. Estimates of deaths attributable to Stalin's policies, through famine, purges, and the gulag system, range from 6 million to 20 million people. The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture alone, the policy that Deng Xiaoping would later reverse in China with such dramatic results, killed between 5 and 7 million Ukrainians in what is now recognised as the Holodomor. These were not accidents or unfortunate side effects. They were, as the book argues carefully, the logical consequence of a system that placed the abstract demands of ideology above the concrete reality of human lives.

What the book does well, and what kept pulling me forward even when the material was heavy, is that it never lets the ideology off the hook while also never pretending that the world communism was responding to was just or humane. The capitalism of the 19th century that Marx observed was not the capitalism of a Scandinavian welfare state. It was raw, brutal, and indifferent to human suffering in ways that made the communist critique not only understandable but, in many respects, accurate. The diagnosis was often right. It was the prescription that kept producing catastrophe.

The book ends in the 21st century, with communism surviving in Cuba, in Vietnam, in the strange hybrid experiment of China where a communist party runs one of the most aggressively capitalist economies on earth. It ends without triumphalism and without eulogy. The idea is not dead. It keeps mutating, keeps reappearing in new forms wherever the gap between the wealthy and the desperate becomes wide enough to make people start asking, again, whether there is not some other way to organise the world.

I do not think everyone will agree with where the author lands. I did not always agree with him. But I finished the book knowing considerably more than when I started it, and thinking considerably harder. For a history of one of the most consequential ideas in human history, that is exactly what you want.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[Tim Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second of my recent trilogy of Cold War books, this one is a terrific summary of the rise of communism and its spread over much of the world in the 20th century, its ultimate collapse late in the century and the current resurrection of the philosophy and political system in some parts of the modern world.

The author begins with a summary of the development of communist theory, beginning before Karl Marx but, obviously, focused on and his work. Interestingly, he notes, Marx developed his theory of labor without every being or even talking to a 19th-century worker. As became very common in Marx's disciples, he developed an early commitment to violence and dictatorial power in his leadership of his movement. His claim that all wars would cease with the triumph of international socialism is almost laughable with the history of the 20th century behind us, and would be had it not been so tragic.

From Marx, the author moves to the various communist governments that arose in his wake, starting with Lenin and Soviet communism. He describes Lenin's resorting to terror to overcome and control the population. Likewise, he describes the Russian communist party's theft of property, not just real estate, but even forcing people to go to the bank and clean out their safe deposit boxes to put into the public treasury. He also describes the communists ordering soldiers to disobey their military leaders, then, once they had seized control, killing the same soldiers who did not obey their new communist commanders. This is another common feature of communist and socialist leadership: using the rules of the society to gain power, then dumping the rules once they are in power.

He also describes the collapse of the Russian economy and starvation of tens of thousands of people at the outset because of the party's seizure of all property. Another common outcome of communist takeovers everywhere.

He describes international communism's undermining of families and traditional--especially religious--morals as a means of revolution, since those institutions are the main counters to communist systems.

The author also describes Stalin's takeover of the party after Lenin had a stroke and his industrializing Lenin's bad policy. Only the onset of the war with Germany helped Stalin unify the country and grow it into an industrial powerhouse, with a lot of help from the United States and the west. One interesting point he made was that Stalin and his minions killed more of their own soldiers, over 300,000, during the war than all of the British soldiers who died in combat. Life is certainly not precious in a communist system.

The author moves on to Mao's China which I have commented on in my review of "Mao" but I'll add here only that this author's estimate of the "20 million" famine deaths in the Great Leap Forward are much higher than other sources--perhaps as many as 32-46 million of Mao's own countrymen died from famine and starvation due to poor leadership and economic socialism.

He goes on to describe other communist governments in the 20th century, and one interesting aspect was the intentional doping of its athletes by the East German government in the latter part of the 20th century in order to dominate international sports competitions. Many of them never knew they were taking steroids and other performance enhancers and they had devastating effects on some of them.

Mr. McMeekin concludes with a short summary of the current resurrection of interest in socialist and communist systems and warns us against repeating the errors of the last century. We would be wise to heed his warning.

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[U888 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of communism is a well-tilled field, with many comprehensive histories, such as Joshua Muravechik's and Richard Pipes's, appearing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sean McMeekin's does not necessarily plow new ground, but it is one of the most extensive and well-written accounts out there, and, as he points out, previous histories that assumed, like Muravchik's and Pipes's, they were functioning also obituaries did not take account the survival of communism, most especially in China, but also in its more socialist-leaning authoritarian forms in the rest of the world.

McMeekin points out the bloodthirsty nature of communists from their origins, going back to LaBoeuf's "Conspiracy of Equals" in the French Revolution, but especially since Karl Marx created the First International in 1864 in London and he kicked out Bakunin and the more anarchist leaners in 1872, after whcih Bakunin presciently warned of the authoritarian tendencies in Marxism. Nowhere did Communism ever attain a popular majority in a vote, but the meglomanical tendencies of its leaders, especially Vladmir Lenin, led them to topple governments all around the world.

One of the themes in this book is the continous hoodwinking of intellectuals, whether through appeals to equality in Stalinist Russia or putative sports domination (in reality due to steroids and pharmacology) in the 1970s or 1980s. Intellectuals even celebrated the supposed "peaceful" fall of communism as "Velvet Revolutions" (in reality mainly focused on Gustav Husak's Czechoslovkia). The collapse looks less peaceful when one considers Gorbachev's attacks on Kazahkahstan, Lihtuaniana, Latvia and elsewhere to keep the USSR together. Gorbachev failed mainly because he had already alienated the military with attempts to deflect blame on them for such crackdowns to continue getting Western loans and funds. The violent suppression of June 4 1989 in China looks more telling in retrospect and is more indictative of communist's bloody determination to keep power in the face of any opposition. While some argued that Communism in China is different today because it allows private companies, McMeekin points out that even Stalinist Russia relied on foreign concessionaires and investors. Modern Chinese communism, with its authoritarian state party and control of the "commanding heights" of the economy looks more in that tradition that previous writers would credit.

The history of the 20th century was to a large extent the history of communism, and McMeekin here wonderfully tells that sordid tale. He also reminds us that much of the 21st century will be spent dealing with communism as well.

[Paul Sand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book won the "Hayek Prize" from the Manhattan institute earlier this year. That's a reliable signal that it's worthwhile reading in my ideological comfort zone. The author, Sean McMeekin, is a history professor at Bard College; judging from the titles of his other books, he specializes in all things Commie.

His book was unavailable at Portsmouth Public Library, but the good Interlibrary Loan folks at the University Near Here were happy to fetch a copy from the Boston Public Library. (Thanks as always, Jean!)

As you might guess from the subtitle, it's a global history of Communism, starting off from musings of Plato, but only getting its modern form in the woolly-headed thoughts of Thomas More, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, and others. And finally maturing in the works and activism of Karl Marx. Who combined bad economics, dubious historicism, a contempt for liberalism, and flaming rhetoric into an ideology that predicted … well. nothing that resembled what actually happened. Which, over decades, and over many countries was (variously): ruthless terror, pestilence, hunger, repression, and poverty. Examples abound, and McMeekin describes even the most stomach-turning ones dispassionately.

Appropriately enough for a Hayek Prize-winner, the book provides plenty of examples illustrating Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom: "Why the Worst Get on Top". Whatever charisma the Communist leaders exhibited was invariably backed up by an iron fist. (Before reading, I was under the impression that Trotsky was a kindler, gentler version of Stalin. Nope, sorry: that Mexican ice axe was too good for him.)

A recurring sub-theme in the book: the occasional lifelines and bailouts the non-Communist West offered struggling Communist regimes, for example: 1921's Russian Famine Relief Act; (somewhat more understandable) the Lend-Lease program during WWII; extending most-favored-nation status to China; and more.

And another take-home point: when Communists take their boots off the necks of their subjects even slightly, it can result in chains being thrown off. Sometimes it works (Eastern Europe); sometimes it doesn't (Tiananmen Square).

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for everyone. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Ideas have consequences, and the ideas of Karl Marx (taken up by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.) have certainly been proven to be lethal to so many in the 20th and now 21st century. It was interesting to me how Marx got his ideas out--by riding on the coattails of benefactors. But he could articulate things in writing that were moving to so many, and people looked at the theory without being able to see the actuality of what those ideas would require to make it happen. The idea that Marx eventually came to grips with in understanding that people would not voluntarily give up private property made a shift in his thinking--and in others' too. I've read that communism is just socialism with guns. If people have to give up their private property, then they must be desperate or placed in a desperate situation.
Finally, it was also interesting how often the Soviets needed the help of capitalist countries to get out of the holes that communism placed them into.

I believe that reading this would give everyone a fuller insight into the Woke culture. For anyone who subscribes to that philosophy (such as what we saw initially with BLM and their "doctrinal statement" that was posted online--until they removed it and people saw their statements about the effort to dissolve the family, which Marx and Lenin and Mao all saw as essential to get communism in place), the onus is on them to ask themselves how today's ideas and implementation of socialism/communism will be different? How will today's socialist/communist ideas achieve a better end? I was reminded again how often it is the youth that are targeted for the purpose of making the socialist/communist ideas come to fruition.

It is frustrating to think of how so many in the Soviet/communist governments not only got away with causing so much suffering, but how they were lauded by many in their day.
While every government system has its shortcomings and at times hypocrisies in how it is lived out, it seems that none have been so devastating towards life and liberty as Marx's ideas.

I wouldn't mind re-reading this book, only discussing it with others this time.

[Anthony D · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Fred Baerkircher · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.