Reds: A Global History of Communism

by Paul Mason

Reds tells the global history of communism, going beyond the turmoil of the 20th century, and exploring communist ideas, movements, and regimes. It starts in antiquity, not in 1917. It centres not just on the obvious leaders and thinkers but asks how the idealism of millions of working-class activists could lead to their acquiescence in mass murder, repression and social atomisation. A fact whose legacy – unfortunately – is alive and kicking in both Russia and China today.

Paul Mason's startling new book will argue that the desire to live without hierarchy and property is an impulse deeply rooted in our human nature. Reds traces the history of communist ideas through revolts in the ancient and medieval worlds, and chronicles the rise of 19th century anti-capitalist movements. Using first hand testimonies of both the perpetrators and the victims, Mason gives a new and terrifying account of how the 20th century experiment in communism turned into a totalitarian nightmare. But, he argues, the story is not over. Western democracies are stagnant and lacking self-belief. Looming climate chaos demands radical economic answers. Millions of people in the global south see China's offer of authoritarian, state-led development model as a viable alternative. And among the Western left, new forms of techno-egalitarianism vie with right-wing libertarianism in the battle over the digital future.

Reds will be a major analysis as we head into a dangerous new world order where China and Russia threaten major change to the world's democracies.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, World History

587 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 27, 2026

Reviews

[Eclipse Moonflower · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Even the freedom to think rationally was purged from the brains of communists."

Rating: 4/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆

Key Topics: Chronic Absenteeism, Dangers of "Revolutionary Ecstasy," Militarization of Agriculture, and the Failures of Bureaucracy.

As someone with a personality disorder, I genuinely appreciate Paul Mason, writer of Reds: A Global History of Communism, mentioning how this factor is irrelevant when weighed against the scale of tragedies Stalin caused. I equally appreciate his unsparing inclusion of how fears of sexual liberation were weaponized to justify rape, sex slavery, and systemic torture. Mason refuses to sanitize any of the atrocities detailed across this 500-page work, honoring the reality of Soviet anti-Semitism with precise, highly researched detail that is often difficult to find elsewhere.

“By alienating us from work itself, and indeed from nature, capitalism systematically negates our humanity.”

Global politics pits oppressor nations against the oppressed. Wealthy countries rely on colonial extraction to survive, making anti-colonial liberation the single main catalyst needed to dismantle the entire system. Mason details the origins of both Anti-Fascist Action (Antifa) and the African Blood Brotherhood—the latter leading to a groundbreaking proposition by Black communist Harry Haywood: Black people in America constitute an oppressed nation, not merely a racial minority, and are fully deserving of the right to self-determination.

“Few were prepared to acknowledge that bureaucratism was the logical outcome of trying to impose communism in conditions of scarcity.”

Mason highlights the "Sinification of Marxism," a phenomenon that continues to shape our modern geopolitical landscape, paired with the legacy of the 1947 Truman Doctrine. The structural flaws of command economies are laid bare. For instance, production quotas were often calculated by weight rather than quality, incentivizing manufacturers to use absurd workarounds that led to widespread product shortages. Furthermore, because there was no incentive to innovate, system-wide stagnation took hold. While economic crises can sometimes be stabilized, their long-term structural damage can rarely be reversed—a consequence taken far too lightly in retrospective discussions of the era.

"It was plain that - as Trotsky argued in the 1930's - unless the bureaucracy could become an all-seeing superintelligence, there was little chance of progressing to a form of society where things were abundant and work voluntary, as in Marx's vision."

Communism can function as a form of fascism. The emphasis here belongs on can. For example, the Chinese state claims the label of communism, yet the mechanisms used to achieve its current standing were inherently capitalist and equated with state-socialism—a blatant contradiction of its core theory. But what is truth when information can simply be accepted or ignored? While the USSR relied on a secret police state to maintain population control, China mobilized mass movements. Reading Mason's chronicle leaves one asking: How much longer can we negotiate our way out of a nuclear-armed conflict? The ultimate lesson is a stark reminder of how political labels are manipulated, exposing the vast chasm separating pure theory from practical application.

As demonstrated throughout Reds, a fundamental "crisis of belief" has the power to completely collapse economic systems. Even today, recent signaling from China directly contradicts the liberation principles it purports to embody, choosing instead to profit off a failing system—the exact opposite of ethical leadership. Mason warns that "multipolarity will breed chaos throughout the century," dynamics that are actively unfolding now through the friction between international and independent communist factions. Amid this analysis, Mason offers a grounding principle: his own non-negotiable socialist baseline is to always view human beings in all their inherent complexity.

According to Mason, three major forces shape contemporary social justice struggles: the masses, the elite, and a hidden "Stalinist machine determined to shape the outcome of class conflict to its anti-human ends." Historically, the business elite enabled the rise of the Nazi party—a historical precedent we would be wise to remember today as right-wing movements manipulate public anxiety for political gain. Reds makes it clear that if communism is ever to succeed, it requires a meticulous plan that actively dismantles centralized authority rather than fostering it. We must also remain vigilant against historical revisionism, including the distasteful Soviet censorship of the Holocaust, where the phrase "Soviet Civilians" was systematically substituted for the word "Jew."

"[Marxism] was not, despite Marx's claim, the negation of Enlightment philosophy but it's latest expression."

Throughout its turbulent history, nationalism and communism have continually overlapped. Mason explicitly frames the final chapters of Reds as "an album of snapshots," driving home the present-day dysfunction of the communist label. He calls on readers to recognize and understand neo-Stalinism (embracing both "the heroism and the horror"), resist neofascism, and reject "the new order"—which is often just code for engineered chaos. In this history, tragedy consistently precedes heroism: millions of innocent civilians were slaughtered in the name of an inorganic, non-functional system that ultimately collapsed under its own weight.

Thinking the unthinkable has the power to transform the world. We each choose how to wield that capacity—whether for self-interest or the collective good. Grounding ourselves in historical truth is the place to start. A thoroughly researched, challenging work that earns a solid 4 out of 5 stars.

“Where there is scarcity there are prices, whether expressed through monetary exchange or not.”

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for accepting my e-ARC request.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reds is an ambitious and wide-ranging history of communism, tracing its origins well before Marx and Lenin and following its development through the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, Maoism, the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, right up to China’s very different 21st-century model. Mason examines the original ideal of a more equal, classless society to the authoritarian regimes that claimed to embody it and contrasts the genuine appeal and idealism that attracted millions with the repression, famine, purges and mass imprisonment that followed when revolutionary ideals became instruments of state power. I found it quite a demanding read, but accessible, readable and clearly written. It’s informative, thought-provoking and relevant and I learnt a lot from it.

[Charissa Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book courtesy of NetGalley for the purpose of a fair and honest review.

Overview: Communism is believed to have been defeated with the fall of the Soviet Union. So, what is the big fascination with socialism and the utopian dreams that are associated with both socialism and communism? Just because one communist stronghold was so bad, doesn't mean that they all are, right? Let's see what the history of socialism and communism has to show us.

Dislikes: Mr. Mason is a Marxist at the very least. That is the only reason that I can see concerning his theory comes around due to far-right idealogues. Fascism may have used antisemitism yet the socialists, by their own words, didn't approve of the actively practitioners of any religion. They seem to see God as a drug for the downtrodden.

Also, a truly capitalist market does not have monopolies. In order to get a monopoly, you need to have the Government's help in crushing all competition. This is why in communistic countries you have so little choice. The government has picked its winners and everyone else loses. True free markets have a natural block against monopolies as if someone is making too much money in an area, then more people jump on that money making opportunity.

Likes: It was fascinating to see how old socialist utopian ideas were. The seeds popped up in Ancient Greece. Then, you could see the flames flicker in many of the European revolutions.

This book also goes to show that those seeking the socialist utopias knew that they would need and rely on slave labor. Feminism and many equality movements are easily co-opted into utopian ideals.

Conclusion: This is a fascinating book. If you are interested in communism, socialism, or Marxism in any form, then this book is for you. Enjoy the read.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Politics of Being Wrong: Paul Mason’s “Reds” and the Institutions That Make Error Harder to Name
From Utopian design to Leninist discipline, Stalinist falsification and the collapse of central planning, Mason follows certainty as it hardens into structure.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 14th, 2026


As Lenin retreats from War Communism while Kronstadt and internal opposition are being suppressed, a congress table becomes frozen barrier and the space for correcting policy remains wider than the space for correcting power.

Difficult revolutions are often described by the moment they seize power. Paul Mason’s “Reds: A Global History of Communism” is more interested in the moment power discovers it has been wrong – and in who is still allowed to say so. In 1921 Lenin recognizes that War Communism is wrecking the economy and prepares the retreat that will become the New Economic Policy. Almost simultaneously, sailors at Kronstadt demand freer soviet elections and civil liberties, the Workers’ Opposition attacks bureaucratization, and the party moves against organized dissent. Economic policy can still be corrected. The machinery by which politics corrects itself is already being narrowed.

Exactly where Mason places the emphasis matters. “Reds” begins centuries before Bolshevism, with communal Utopias, technocratic schemes and revolutionary conspiracies, because he wants to catch communism before it settles into its twentieth-century shape: first a dream of common ownership, then a theory of history, then a doctrine of action, then a party, a state, an economic system and finally a contested memory. The book’s deepest concern is not that communist governments became murderous or inefficient. It is that movements promising emancipation built institutions increasingly unable to hear contradiction without treating it as disloyalty.


An ordered communal settlement promises equality in its repeated courtyards and shared paths, while one small governing structure casts the longest shadow, returning Mason’s Utopian history to the question of who administers the classless world.

Mason calls this a narrative history rather than an encyclopedia, and the choice can be felt in the joints. Sixteen chapters proceed chronologically, without formal parts, so that one solution hardens almost visibly into the next problem. Babeuf’s clandestine organization leads toward Blanqui’s discipline; Russian populism collides with Marxism; Lenin turns revolutionary theory into an organizational method; civil war rewards centralization; Stalin inherits instruments he did not invent and enlarges them into machinery of terror; central planning later collides with information it cannot reliably gather. The cross-cutting among Russia, Germany, China, Spain and elsewhere is not decorative globe-trotting. Orders, shocks and tactical reversals move across borders quickly enough that international communism begins to feel like a nervous system, including the occasional catastrophic misfire.

Even at its most severe, “Reds” refuses the convenience of knowing how everyone turned out. Mason does not pretend that people drawn to communism were merely waiting for an excuse to build prisons. They encounter monarchy, exploitation, imperialism, hunger, war, fascism and political exclusion. Communists organize workers, resist dictatorships, fight fascists and, in the Soviet case, absorb almost incomprehensible losses defeating Nazism. Courage and complicity share pages because they shared organizations. An ideal does not become fraudulent merely because institutions later weaponize it.


Communards build and inhabit the barricade as both defense and temporary civic commons, preserving the revolutionary exhilaration that makes the later history of discipline, repression and betrayal more than a simple tale of bad faith.

That doubleness matters most in Mason’s treatment of Lenin and Stalin. He neither absolves Lenin nor smuggles Stalin into every earlier Bolshevik decision. Leninism is the hinge because it makes the conquest and defense of state power central to communist strategy, and because bans, expulsions, emergency coercion and party discipline leave tools later rulers can use. Yet Mason argues that Stalin’s fabricated conspiracies, show trials, ethnic persecution and destruction of much of the revolutionary generation are not automatic consequences of Marx or Lenin. Inherited machinery can enlarge the range of possible horrors without dictating which one must arrive.

Read sentence by sentence, the book is propelled by a journalist’s impatience with ceremonial fog. Mason favors medium-length explanatory sentences that gather facts and then stop short, often with a brief verdict that clears the table. He likes the vivid historical particular, the quick character sketch, the doctrinal quarrel translated into an actual decision. Specialized vocabulary arrives without academic plumage; ministries, factions and theories remain attached to rooms, documents, bodies and committees. A five-hundred-page political history rarely moves with this little starch.

If that speed is a pleasure, it is also where the prose can overpersuade. Mason is excellent at carrying a reader from complication to judgment, sometimes so smoothly that the argument seems to have closed before the historical dispute has. His declared politics are not the difficulty; they give the book much of its energy and make clear what is at stake for him. The difficulty comes when resemblance turns into lineage, or lineage into causation, with less friction than the evidence deserves. The sentence has landed. History may still be standing at the baggage carousel.

Perhaps nowhere is that pressure clearer than in the opening chapters. Mason’s Utopian prehistory is lively and provocative: communal societies repeatedly confront the problem of conformity, technocratic planners imagine rule by expertise, and Babeuf’s revolutionaries connect economic equality to clandestine organization. The question behind these episodes is sharp: if private property and class hierarchy disappear, who governs, and through what institutions? But the twentieth century sometimes throws too long a shadow backward. Plato, More, Morelly, Saint-Simon, Babeuf, Marx and Lenin can illuminate one another without becoming stations on a single railway line to Stalin. A history suspicious of political inevitability should be especially careful with retrospective inevitability.

And chronology works precisely because Mason usually resists that temptation. There is no clean chapter break where aspiration expires and authoritarianism begins. The same practical problems return in altered form: how to coordinate action, survive defeat, maintain unity, govern during emergency, tell temporary coercion from permanent authority. “Reds” is particularly good on the afterlife of expediency. Revolutionary measures survive the conditions that produced them; administrative habits acquire doctrine; the exception, before long, is wearing office clothes.

Political history at this scale can turn people into name tags on a conference table. Mason avoids that often enough to matter. Semen Kanatchikov, a worker who rises through Bolshevik institutions and is later consumed by the system he helped serve, returns during the Great Purge as more than an illustrative victim. Mason reconstructs a death the official record falsified. The bureaucracy does not merely kill a man; it manufactures an untrue version of his ending. Power has reached the point where it wants jurisdiction over the past tense.


Semen Kanatchikov’s file places his real execution before the sentence and later natural death assigned to him by the official record, turning bureaucratic falsification into a small, chilling claim of authority over the past.

Against that falsified record, the book’s larger pattern comes into focus. “Reds” is, beneath its declared subject, a history of the politics of being wrong. What institutions can tell leaders that a cherished theory has failed? What happens when disagreement becomes evidence of disloyalty, bad news threatens careers, and errors are easier to disguise than correct? Mason follows the problem from revolutionary cells to faction bans, from Stalinist orthodoxy to doctored files and economic planning. Kronstadt is especially revealing: the Bolsheviks can change an economic policy while narrowing the channels through which political error can be contested. A government can adapt and still become less corrigible.

During the long Soviet decline, that political problem turns material. Central planning requires immense quantities of timely, local, contradictory information. Enterprises flatter targets, ministries defend their interests, planners work with distorted signals, reforms threaten the bureaucracies expected to enact them. Computers promise salvation but cannot cleanse bad data or decide political ends. Mason eventually names information, or truth, as what kills centralized planning. The claim is strongest when it joins two failures usually discussed apart: a state that makes unwelcome information politically costly also makes accurate economic coordination harder.

It is also where Mason’s most elegant idea begins to explain a little too much. Soviet failure involves incentives, weak productivity, distorted allocation, military burdens, bureaucratic self-protection, nationalism, partial reforms and exhaustion as well as information. Mason knows this and supplies much of the evidence himself. Still, “truth” is such an attractive master key that the other causes can start to resemble locks designed for it. The synthesis illuminates; it does not exhaust. That distinction is worth keeping in a book so alert to the dangers of explanations that become difficult to challenge.


Reports, targets and plans converge on the administrative center but arrive distorted, incomplete or circular, giving visual form to Mason’s argument that a state that makes unwelcome information politically costly eventually makes accurate economic coordination harder as well.

Mason pays elsewhere for the size of his canvas. By following communists as his principal actors, he necessarily gives feminists, liberals, social democrats, nationalists and cultural movements less room except where they meet or obstruct his chosen line. China must also carry unusual weight in the opening and conclusion despite an evidentiary record Mason acknowledges is less open and intimate than the post-Soviet archive. These are declared limits, not hidden defects. Yet declaration does not erase effect. A very confident synthesis can make what it leaves outside the frame feel, for a moment, as if it happened somewhere else.

If chronology gives “Reds” its forward motion, recurrence gives it texture. Barricades begin as practical technology and become revolutionary mythology. Cells become factions, factions become parties, parties become apparatuses. Utopian administration returns as economic planning. Technology repeatedly promises abundance, first through industry, later through computation and finally through digital systems. Above all, emergency measures outlive their emergencies. Mason says chronology is his method; much of the book’s meaning comes from watching old political problems return in new uniforms.

The final chapter, on contemporary China, is why “Reds” cannot end comfortably with the Soviet collapse. Mason argues that the most successful surviving communist party presides over an economy transformed largely through capitalist methods while preserving centralized party authority, censorship, surveillance and ideological discipline. The paradox forces a separation the preceding history has been preparing. Mason does not want to abandon the desire for equality, every form of planning, or the possibility of a society less dependent on markets and compulsory work. He wants to abandon the political tradition that treats monopoly of power as the road to liberation. China sharpens the point because economic methods can change almost beyond recognition while the party’s claim to political supremacy remains largely nonnegotiable.


A restless contemporary city shifts beneath rigid institutional architecture, separating the extraordinary adaptability of China’s economic life from the political supremacy Mason sees as the durable Leninist inheritance.

Rather than requiring a topicality parade, “Reds” carries its present tense inside its design. Mason begins and ends with struggles over historical memory because the argument eventually reaches beyond policy into the ownership of fact. Gulag memorials, Tiananmen, Mao, Stalin and the stories states tell about them are not ornaments proving that the past still matters. Kanatchikov’s falsified death record has already shown the smaller version of the same impulse. A state that claims authority over what citizens may say about the present will have reasons to police what they are allowed to remember about the past.

Of the books that sit nearest Mason’s project, David Priestland’s “The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World” is closest in sweep, while François Furet’s “The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century” shadows its concern with political belief. Mason’s position is less elegiac than either comparison might suggest. Capitalism’s survival is not, for him, moral vindication, and his warning is aimed most sharply at readers who have not abandoned the wish for a more equal world. “Reds” still wants something from the future, which is part of what keeps its argument from becoming an obituary.

Part of the book’s charge comes from Mason quarreling with an inheritance rather than delivering a coroner’s report. He wants to salvage the moral horizon without salvaging the machinery that claimed to reach it. At moments, especially near the end, the activist’s urgency presses harder than the historian’s restraint. More often, that declared stake clarifies the audience he is actually addressing: not people already convinced that equality is dangerous, but people tempted to believe that a good destination can make concentrated authority harmless.

Only after all that do the numbers seem useful: “Reds” earns 85/100, or 4/5 stars. It is a formidable synthesis whose explanatory architecture does not quite escape the costs of its own ambition. The prose is brisk rather than beautiful, the character work vivid rather than immersive, the history selective by design, and the information thesis occasionally too pleased with the fit of its own key. But by the end, Kronstadt looks different from the way it did at the beginning: one kind of correction survived while another was being made harder to imagine. That distinction travels through “Reds” like a hairline crack across glass, almost invisible at first, then suddenly explaining the shape of the break. Mason’s final warning is not that people should stop wanting societies radically better than the ones they inhabit. It is that any politics calling itself emancipatory must build a way to be contradicted, corrected and, if necessary, defeated. The most dangerous political systems may not begin with the wrong answer. They may be the ones that gradually destroy the room in which anyone can tell them so.

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Historical Figure Watercolor Reference Bank


Cover-Palette and Wash Study


Composition and Negative-Space Study


Sailor Movement and Paper-Contact Study


Border and Hand-Lettering Study


First Underdrawing Study


First-Wash Visualization

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.

[Bharat Chugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reds tells the story of communism as one of history’s most fascinating ideas and, like many fascinating ideas, one of its great causes of misery. A case study, perhaps, in what Hayek called the fatal conceit: the belief that a single mind, theory or ideology can engineer society and reliably produce the desired outcomes.

But Mason is fair and balanced, and gives communism its due. He shows how it rallied millions around a deeply human cause: a fairer and more equal world. And that aspiration remains relevant today, given capitalism’s own brutal excesses and cruelties.

Perhaps that is the real lesson.

No single system, however noble its intentions, should ever become too sure of itself.

Rights, freedom, the rule of law, and the ordinary human dignity of every individual are not obstacles to some greater project. They are the values that keep us from becoming the demons we set out to fight.

Put differently, these values—and, perhaps more importantly, humility about our own limitations—are what prevent a well-meaning project from becoming the road to hell paved with good intentions.

[Pauline Stout · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is all about the history and tragedy of communism. This book was a deeply interesting read. I admit to not knowing much about the subject beforehand. Reading about some of this can be deeply upsetting but with the political climate of today it’s important to read. This is well researched and well written. It had my attention from cover to cover. I highly recommend this and will be reading more from the author in the future.

[Faith Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A history of the world in communism - except, it's very much about the Russian experience with passing information about other countries as you go. It's well written and my daughter, who has read widely in this area, has said she'll recommend it to her friends as an intersting introduction.
Thank you for the advance copy.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an advance copy of this history book that looks at the ideas and thinkers that helped shaped Communism, from ideal utopia, to an answer to rampant capitalism that slowly became corrupted, to a form of control that is gaining a lot of ground, and what it means for the future.

I played a lot of role playing games as a child. This I think is one of the best ways for people to see how groups and communities can form, and how quickly things can turn. People would role play, but they were actually being themselves, even if they were playing elves, magic-users, spies, or space knights. One could see a group going one way, a stronger personality making decisions that might not be popular, but just seemed easier to deal with. And those who thought nothing of letting other players die, to gain experience, levels and power. I think this early experience shaped me in many ways. I am not a joiner. While I like hippie music, I am certainly not a hippie. And I like knowledge, care little for religion, and don't wish to push my thoughts on others, plus I don't mind paying to help others, so I am not conservative. As for Communism, I doubt I ever gave it a thought, outside of its historical context. As my father once told me, people like nice things, and love to not let other have nice things. Left or right, it comes down to control. In reading this book, I saw control of a person's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, on every page. And how easily it is being taken away, along with our history of how wer got here. Reds: A Global History of Communism by historian and journalist Paul Mason is a history of people trying to live life in the short time we are here, the ideas that rule us, how hard it is to agree, and the darkness of a totalitarian future that many seem eager to embrace.

The book begins with a look at the world, the rise of China, a Communist economy that seems to offer people around the world something that the West, particularly America seems bad at currently. Stability, competence, and a place at a table. Mason states that he wrote this book in answer to the fact that history is being rewritten. That the millions of deaths that have taken place, the eradication of privacy, the current unease in the world is being not only ignored but rewritten. And that China is offering solutions that might be too good to be true, but the message is hard to ignore. Mason looks back at the ideas of Utopia, to classic ideas in the far past, and revolutions that have shaped the world. While many start with the best of intentions, things go wrong quickly, as power begin its so creep into corruption. How one person can have an answer, and yet has a vast state to make sure that no unnecessary questions are asked. Mason uses quotes, actions, real events, and the writings of various people to show the history of communism and its many defenders and thinkers. Along with the path the future might have.

An interesting book that asks alot of itself, and mostly delivers. The book is well-written and does explain itself well. However there is a lot going on, a lot of moments covered, and a lot just committed because of space. That said I still enjoyed might not be the best word, but I did, enjoy the give and take, the paths that Mason followed, and how he explains his arguments. Not everyone will enjoy this look, and that is fine. This is a book to start discussions, to not trust a Google search or ask AI what is best for people. Maybe these discussions will lead to more and better answers. Or maybe the problems of the world will just get worse. The odds are pretty close right now.

A book of history, and a book on thought, with much that people might not like, will argue with, and will probably be denounced in some meeting rooms. Which is healthy and good, and of all things, right. A book that will leave one with questions, maybe even a few angry ones, but questions that should be asked about all of our systems, left, right and center.

[Angelina Titeryakova · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have had a much different (and positive) review if it had another title (it would have been 5 *)
My biggest letdown of this book is that it doesn't deliver on its promise - a global history of Communism. It deals mainly with events connected to the USSR, a bit of China, and a speckle of other nations. I liked the part where we had a few paragraphs that followed what happened in the different countries and how they responded to each other - if it had more of this, it would have been great. I was surprised that a lot of countries with interetsing communism histiry weren't mentioned at all, like Romania, Yugoslavia (ok, it was mentioned, but what felt like a second), Albania (huge suprise as the regime there was one of the most 'comunist' like) or Bulgaria (where we has a bit more "free" versionof communism; Dimitrov was mentioned in passing to be fair).
Otherwise, I liked the way it was written and presented; you can tell that Mason knows what he is writing about and the research that went into it. I learned more than a few things (as this is definitely not my historical period, which is the main reason I wanted to read the book).
As mentioned, for me, the title is misleading; the content is good.

I would recommend it to people who want to learn more about communism, especially in the USSR, and how the USSR came to be.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for the ARC

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

There are few ideologies that have such an impact on the world as Communism, and this book aims to give an overview of its history. This is a major task and the book does not have as broad of coverage as I had expected. The core of the book is focused on the Soviet Union before WW2, which does somewhat undermine the claim of the book to be a "Global History". China is discussed in detail but most of the rest of the world is only briefly mentioned.

However, what is covered is discussed well. The book is readable and enjoyable, it never got bogged down in technical details or abstract theory. The book does a good job charting the development of the idea of Communism, how the Bolsheviks interpreted (or twisted) it and by doing so, sowed the seeds of their own collapse. The author is broadly sympathetic to the idea of Communism, but strongly critical of how it was implemented in practice. So he doesn't hold back on criticising the flaws of central planning, the murderous purges or the self-serving foreign policy decisions of the Soviet Union.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Mason's "Reds" is a history of communism. "Reds" as a title is a tad misleading as the book portrays communism in all its stripes, not just the familiar red associated with China and the old flag of the USSR flag. As a history, Mason dives deep and it makes for something of a complex read. It certainly highlights how the idealism of communism is quickly corrupted by man. The book is thoroughly researched and deeply cited. Much like the end of communism in the early 90's, the last chapter about the end sweeps by too quickly. The book makes for challenging reading but is worth it. Thank you to #netgalley and #scribner for the opportunity to preview this book.

[George Mallett · Rating 3.25 out of 5]

Warms into it after a heavy theoretical start