Sean McMeekin’s new book about the trajectory of the most consequential political movement of the 20th century, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, is an ambitious effort to chronicle an ideology birthed in the early 1900s by a heretofore obscure exile that managed to seize power in Russia, inspire imitators around the world, and by the end of the 1970s claim hegemony in countries ranging from Eastern Europe to China with outposts in Africa (Angola and Ethiopia) and Latin America (Cuba). Its millions of adherents saw themselves as the bearers of a new civilization opposed to the exploitation that allegedly characterized both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes. Its march to power was brutal and relentless, leaving in its wake untold millions of victims.
Yet, within little more than a year, it largely collapsed in all the Warsaw Pact countries, including the Soviet Union, and also fell apart in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Mongolia. By the mid-1990s only China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba remained openly communist. While fascism, the other totalitarian ideology that had emerged from the ruins of World War I, was destroyed in a catastrophic world war, communism was not defeated by a military defeat that left the countries in which it had flourished devastated. Instead, it largely rotted from within.
In addition to telling this compelling story, McMeekin, a professor at Bard College and author of several controversial books about the Soviet Union, also includes an odd epilogue that argues that far from marking the end of communism, the events of 1989-1992 were only a hiccup and that "most of the Western world is now converging instead on a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist government and social life. … Far from dead, communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started."
While McMeekin has managed to provide an entertaining and readable summary of an enormous amount of material in less than 500 pages, his achievement comes at a cost—many events and issues are simplified and caricatured in order to tell such a wide-ranging story. And his epilogue is jarring, substituting wild generalizations and alarmist predictions for careful analysis.
While his account of the rise and fall of communist governments throughout the world is an impressive achievement, McMeekin’s discussion of the ideology itself has some shortcomings. The first section of the book briefly surveys the utopian yearnings that date back to Plato that animated the founders of modern socialism, particularly among thinkers during the French Revolution. We also get a summary of Marx’s ideas that inspired the growth of socialist parties in Europe, and details of the quarrels that roiled even those who proclaimed themselves his followers. McMeekin locates Marx among the authoritarian socialists opposed by utopians and anarchists, emphasizes the tensions between German and French socialist parties in the run-up to World War I, and details the growth of a powerful strain of revisionism originating in Germany that provided the theoretical basis for the development of modern democratic socialism.
But problems begin when he turns to the views of Vladimir Lenin that energized a substantial segment of socialists and formed the basis of communism. It is a truism that Lenin transformed Marxism. Appalled by the failure of European socialists to oppose their countries’ participation in World War I, he put forward the argument that Marxists had to work for the defeat of their own countries, a position he called "revolutionary defeatism." As McMeekin shows, he followed his own advice, supporting Germany and accepting its help in undermining Russian war efforts. By insisting that Marxists could midwife a revolution in a relatively backward country like Russia, he also fundamentally altered Marx’s vision of the trajectory and nature of a socialist revolution, rejecting the notion that it required a substantial industrial base and an urban working-class majority.
McMeekin, however, glides over the most basic principle that Lenin insisted upon in 1902 when he argued in What is to be Done that a communist revolution required the creation of a party composed of professional revolutionaries that, acting as the vanguard of the proletariat, would lead a revolution. Waiting for the working class to develop a revolutionary consciousness was a prescription for inaction and failure. Departing from the European model of a loosely knit socialist party, Lenin insisted that merely agreeing with the party program was not enough; a communist had to actively work to bring about a revolution. Together with his model of democratic centralism that required obedience to party positions, his organizational principles, crafted to enable party work in an authoritarian setting, became the benchmark for communists around the world once the success of the Russian Revolution seemed to confirm its usefulness. It marked the transformation of Marxism into Marxism-Leninism and enabled a small group of dedicated revolutionaries to punch far above their weight in the battles that were to come.
That principle, enshrined in the Comintern’s conditions for membership, was the primary marker of what made a Communist Party. The Bolshevik seizure of power was enabled by German support, the incompetence of the provisional government, and Lenin’s willingness to use terror on a scale never imagined by the Tsarist regime. (In two months, the Bolsheviks killed more Russians than had been murdered in the prior century of Tsarist rule.) But standing behind every one of these events was The Party.
As McMeekin demonstrates, the USSR’s policies could—and did—change on a dime. Support for revolutions abroad—the Comintern fomented uprisings in Germany and Hungary and briefly held hope that the Red Army could conquer Poland in 1920, only to suffer a humiliating defeat in the Battle of Warsaw—could alternate with proclamations about the need to build socialism in one country. Ultra-radical policies of War Communism could give way to the New Economic Policy to encourage limited capitalism. Militant antifascism could suddenly morph into a pact with Hitler’s Germany. Such abrupt shifts did not undermine the regime because they were based on the principle that the Party had a monopoly on truth and all good communists had to accept its policies.
Despite the human costs, the prestige of communism grew in Europe and the United States during the 1930s, fueled by a worldwide depression and the rise of fascism in Germany. But it was a deal with Nazi Germany that led to the first expansion of communism since the revolution. The Nazi-Soviet Pact enabled the USSR to swallow the Baltic states, take control of eastern Poland and seize Karelia during its war with Finland. Similarly, the advance of the Red Army into Europe during World War II ensured that in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Albania, communist governments came to power after the war. No European communist party ever won an election (though the Italian party came close in 1948); in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, non-Communist parties and social movements were intimidated, neutered, or destroyed. The largest territorial expansion of communist influence came in China where Mao Zedong’s communist guerrillas seized control in 1949 after a brutal civil war. McMeekin notes that every communist regime used force to take power and employed torture and mass executions.
The discussion of the fall of communism is shorter and less satisfying. McMeekin spends less time detailing how communist states failed to meet their economic goals than he does discussing their efforts to win propaganda wars with the West by emphasizing winning Olympic medals (10 pages!).
Many communist vulnerabilities were country-specific. The most shocking moment of truth for the communist movement came with Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin in 1956, undercutting many communists’ faith in the Party. Soviet invasions of Hungary to crush a revolution and Czechoslovakia to halt communist reformists deepened hatred of the USSR. Poland’s Solidarity movement undercut the myth that communism represented the interests of the working class. Economic malaise and stagnation spawned discontent. Dissident movements demanding more intellectual freedom and Jewish emigration spread throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR.
In Asia, Cambodia’s communist regime was ousted by a fellow-communist Vietnamese offensive after the indescribably brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. China meanwhile swung wildly from one Maoist enthusiasm to another, leading to the splintering of the world communist movement and culminating in the Great Cultural Revolution that decimated the economy. Attempting to prop up a nascent communist government in Afghanistan, the USSR marched into a military quagmire that sapped its morale.
By 1989 the tensions in the communist world were at a fever pitch. American economic and military pressure panicked Mikhail Gorbachev to attempt to reform the increasingly sclerotic Soviet state. He failed and nationalistic sentiments and the desire for freedom led to the collapse of European communist governments. Although McMeekin notes that very few transitions were free of violence, in fact, given how brutal communist regimes had been and how many levers of violence they still controlled, remarkably few people were killed.
In China, on the other hand, the regime was willing to deploy the army to massacre anti-communist protesters and retain power. McMeekin believes that the Chinese model of "statist governance and social life," in which private companies "are harnessed by the state to track, monitor, censor and control private communications, speech and political activity" has now become the model for Western governments, amplified by the restrictions imposed during the COVID epidemic. Whatever one thinks about the power of big tech companies or the increasing prevalence of surveillance made possible by new technologies, to claim that it is an early manifestation of communism is balmy. Individualism and social solidarity have been in conflict since the Enlightenment. Until we see the emergence of a hierarchical political party that claims a monopoly on the use of force, demands the total obedience of its members, and outlaws all competing centers of power, it is scare-mongering and minimizes the abundant crimes of communism that McMeekin has ably documented.
To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism
by Sean McMeekin
Basic Books, 544 pp., $35
Harvey Klehr is the author of numerous books and articles on communism and Soviet espionage.