Reviewed by: Mason Mohon, Sr., Asst. Director of Archives & Research, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles

The commodification of political ideology is a distasteful phenomenon of the Internet age. Ideologies are embraced and discarded like pairs of shoes. They are status symbols in an online game, disconnected from reality. This is especially egregious with Communism. When online users throw on the garb of Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., they erase the real history by positing these ideologies as internet quirks.

Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World covers the history of Communism in fascinating and gruesome detail. The grim reality leaps off the pages in McMeekin’s clear and engaging prose. The book is divided into two parts: Communism in theory and Communism in practice.

An often-repeated adage is that Communism is good in theory but hard to implement in practice. It is a misconception to imagine that Communism just means “sharing” or something benign. Communist theory has always been open about violence and authoritarianism. The proto-Communist utopian Francois-Noel Babeuf wrote explicitly about the need for mass violence to establish a property-free society. Babeuf’s writings inspired Karl Marx, who was also explicit about the apocalyptic violence needed for Communism’s arrival.

Violence is perhaps the only part of Communist theory that translates well into practice. Communist economic theory has always been and always will be untenable, completely divorced from reality. Throughout history, every Communist regime begrudgingly tolerated private enterprise to some degree. Those regimes that did not either collapsed immediately or quickly changed course.

Karl Marx, the father of Communist theory, was influenced by (Georg Wilhelm) Friedrich Hegel’s understanding of an underlying logic to human development and history. Marx was a lifelong student, living off his parents’ money and discussing philosophy with Hegelians. He believed philosophy needed to be an active force rather than an object of pontification. Marx’s first writings were about the liberation of the proletarian. They would be liberated, he argued, by a philosophically inspired revolution. He had not yet set foot in a factory or interviewed a worker. His “knowledge” about the proletariat was not based on any data but instead on his dialectical reasoning written in notebooks. Once he met actual factory workers, he was generally unimpressed. They did not philosophize like he did.

Marx believed Communism was the solution to the Hegelian progression of history. Feudalism transformed into Capitalism, and Capitalism would transform into Communism. Importantly, this required minimal human intervention. Historical forces mandated this shift, according to Marxist and Hegelian doctrine.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels encouraged all communists to shout their ideas as loud as they could to take over Europe. McMeekin writes with rightfully cynical disdain about Marx’s arguments: “In the grand and wholly unsourced style of Hegelian history writing,” Marx gave an account of the history of labor and why communism just had to come around. It had little basis, coming from a spoiled and unemployed overgrown child’s philosophical musing.

Communism as a means of governing comes down to a single concept: the abolition of private property by any means necessary. Proudhon, a socialist critic of Marx, warned that Marx’s admittedly authoritarian project would result in the abolition of individuality and freedom. Marx agreed with this assessment. He was fully cognizant that authoritarianism and violent suppression of dissent were necessary for Communism to work.

Marx wrote his economic theory in Das Kapital, arguing that workers are kept down by the capitalist appropriation of supplementary labor-power. Even if their wages go up, this only serves to loosen their chains, but they are not in control of their situation. Labor is always secondary to capital, and capital will never willingly reduce the exploitation of labor. Marx took on Adam Smith, who argued that increases in labor productivity result both in cheaper products and higher wages, benefitting both worker and employer. Marxist economics is zero-sum, however, and disconnected from reality. His theory evaluates the economy through an ideological frame rather than by taking a first principles approach.

Marx’s popularity stemmed from the hypnotic allure of his prophesies of an apocalyptic, violent revolution that would flip the script. He urged all workers to reject international differences and together embrace their quest to achieve political power.

After Marx died in 1883, German Communists fell into ideological civil war. Eduard Bernstein, a faithful disciple of Marx, was the first to realize that his teacher’s predictions for capital accumulation were not coming true. He noticed that economic factors were increasing general wellbeing and wages. He argued that socialists should advocate for workers’ rights rather than overthrow capitalism. This sober reflection was met with excommunication. Die-hard communists argued that, as long as their devotion to the cause was religious, they would not fail.

Meanwhile, The Russian Marxist Party had split into two factions. The majority (Bolshevik) faction was led by Vladimir Lenin, with Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky as top lieutenants. Lenin’s mistress, Inessa Armand, argued in favor of using war to springboard revolution. She and Lenin worked to make the idea of intensification toward civil war part of the Communist playbook. During World War I, Lenin critiqued the chauvinism of Russia, but not the Germans or Austro-Hungarians, because the goal was to turn the people against their government. This stemmed from his doctrine of revolutionary defeatism: if your country loses a war, you can use its weakened state as a springboard for revolution. The goal was to organize a large-scale mutiny to poison Russia in wartime.

In October 1916, Lenin formulated his military program for proletarian revolution. Soldiers should subvert their own countries. Instead of fighting against other workers, they should turn the gun to the capitalists. He urged women and children to join the fight as well. He was promoting and working toward the global bonfire of violence Marx prophesied in Das Kapital.

On February 23, 1917, the strikes began in Russia. Two days later, serious violence started. Tsar Nicholas II called in the military to crush the violent strike, but when the soldiers were ordered to fire on protesters and refused, and a soldier shot his commanding officer, mutiny spread like wildfire. Lenin was directly supported by the German government. They supplied his travel and funded the Bolsheviks in Russia, hoping to cripple their wartime enemy. On October 25, Bolsheviks surrounded and stormed the Winter Palace, taking over just after midnight and stopping the clocks. The first communist regime was born, and Lenin encouraged soldiers to overthrow their generals loyal to the old regime, thus the beginning of communism in practice.

After the Bolsheviks took power, many less radical socialists and Mensheviks resisted, but they were crushed. Many government employees refused to cooperate and walked out. The banks shut their doors to the Bolsheviks out of protest. The slow grind of nationalizing the entire economy began.

The Bolsheviks executed the Romanov family on July 16, 1918. Four daughters survived the initial machine gun fire due to the diamonds in their clothing, so Red Guard troops bayoneted them to death. To hide the evidence, they mangled and destroyed the bodies beyond recognition. They were not positively identified until 1989.

On August 30, 1918, three shots were fired at Lenin, kicking off the Red Terror, the first of many communist atrocities. Execution without trial became standard operating procedure. In the first two months, 15,000 people were executed. Germany was aghast and set out to depose the communist regime they helped create. Lenin responded by ordering general conscription. All allied powers were declared hostile forces. By summer 1919, the Red Army had 3.6 million troops.

Three “White” armies rose against the Bolsheviks in an attempt to restore the Constituent Assembly. White was a pejorative term used by the Bolsheviks to describe counterrevolutionaries. These armies were mostly crushed in 1920, and the Bolsheviks became the unambiguous victors.

The new government sought to nationalize all industries, causing widespread unemployment and shortages of fuel and other resources. Russia was also cut off from all international trade. The Supreme Council of the National Economy took charge of the entire economy, but was renamed the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) in 1921. Inflation got so bad that they abolished monetary payments. McMeekin writes, “In this way, the Bolsheviks, in a kind of Communist reductio ad absurdum, tried to abolish money itself — only to realize that economic activity of any kind was impossible without it.” They introduced a new gold-backed currency to stanch the bleeding. Every Russian industry crumbled, with output falling to a fraction of what it had been before the revolution.

Filth and famine were rampant, resulting in widespread disease along with a shortage of doctors and medical equipment. In Ukraine, more than two percent of the population died from Typhus. In Odessa, the death rate was six times the birth rate. Because everyone was sick, hungry, and dying, the Soviet government began enforcing compulsory labor, touting it as a great Soviet achievement and a virtue of their country.

Christian holidays were replaced with new Communist holidays. Marriage by a priest was no longer recognized, and devolved into a civil contract that could be dissolved at any time with no obligation. With all these achievements under their belt, Lenin and the Soviet government knew that, surrounded by capitalist countries, Communism must be spread outside of Russia if they were going to survive.

The Bolsheviks soon moved their central government from Petrograd to Moscow, and began fomenting revolution in nearby countries, with limited success. Communist parties in Germany and Italy became leaner, with only the doctrinally pure remaining. In aligning themselves with Moscow, these European communist organizations were granted access to funding, enabling strikes and protests. However, Moscow-funded uprisings in Germany and Italy floundered. In Italy, Mussolini and the Black Shirts reacted with a march on Rome in October 1922 and put the communists in prison.

French and German communists began agitating in Germany, which was already in rough shape economically. Communist organizations paid workers not to work, making the situation worse. Hyperinflation left Germans angry and looking for a radical anti-Communist alternative, which directly fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

In Russia, the revolution did not bring liberation, but a new slavery. Thousands of protesters were killed and executed, and nearly 7,000 were placed in concentration camps. Lenin implied that Russia would have to tolerate some private enterprise for a period to help the economy, but after he died, nobody could be sure how long he meant. Bukharin, a Marxist intellectual under Stalin, argued that socialism must grow out of private enterprise and that they must tolerate some private enterprise to learn the secrets of capitalist production. Ironically, the secret itself is private enterprise.

In 1927, farmers were withholding their stock from the economy because money had become worthless. This increased the risk of famine. Stalin began purging competing leaders. He then blamed Bukharin for the private farmers withholding stock and got rid of him as well. On December 21, 1929, Stalin achieved supreme power. To “solve” the farmer problem, Stalin arrested over 2.6 million private traders, which laid the groundwork for the Gulags. Stalin demanded the complete eradication of these private farmers (kulaks) on December 27, 1929, and then pushed for industrialization. Communist Russia boasted full employment and rapid growth, but workers were paid little or nothing.

When production targets weren’t met, the regime held show trials for alleged capitalist spies who were supposedly trying to undermine communism. A fifth of the country’s 35,000 trained engineers were arrested.

Between 1930 and 1931, two million primarily Ukrainian kulaks were arrested and forced into labor camps. This was the start of the Holodomor, in which millions were killed. Jews were also persecuted in disproportionate numbers during the 1930s. The 1937 census counted 162 million people, 15 million fewer than the regime expected. This census provides a rough estimate of the number of people killed during the first seven years of Stalin’s reign.

Prior to entering World War II, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, but, writes McMeekin, “Hitler’s persecution of Communists and other Nazi crimes against human decency, from book burnings to attacks on Jews, offered Communists such a perfect ideological counterfoil that not even Stalin’s cooperation with Hitler could ruin it.”

News of the concentration camps, forced labor Gulags, the Holodomor, and the Great Terror were all suppressed within and without the USSR. These atrocities were either dismissed or covered only by Western journalists who were sympathetic to Stalin, such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Many Americans, Communists or not, viewed the USSR as the principled opponent of Nazism, despite its comparable atrocities.

Stalin took over Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland in 1939, which divided Poland in half and gained him 13 million new subjects. The German Wehrmacht did most of the fighting and destroyed the Polish army, so the Soviets lost fewer than eight hundred soldiers. The Holodomor was revived, with farmland partitioned by the state and mass deportations into forced labor Gulags. A total of 1.5 million Poles, many of them Jews, were placed in Soviet concentration camps.

Despite Stalin’s agreement with Hitler, which had granted him nearly 200,000 additional square kilometers and 13 million subjects, the Western powers at war with Germany did not retaliate. On the same day Hitler overtook Paris, Stalin decided to invade Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Communist party bosses were made stewards over the newly invaded territories, and their gold reserves were nationalized. Purges began, and two percent of the Latvian population was executed.

Despite their alliance, Hitler and Stalin became jealous of each other’s growing power. Stalin made a list of terms for joining the alliance with Japan, Germany, and Italy. These terms included demands that German troops withdraw from Finland, and that Stalin be able to station troops in Turkey. Hitler recognized Stalin’s plans and ordered an invasion of the USSR on December 18, 1940, under the name Operation Barbarossa.

In a pure numbers game, the war between Stalin and Hitler should have been decisively in Stalin’s favor. He had a significant material advantage. But Germany had a superior fighting force. Operation Barbarossa was launched on June 22, 1941. Within hours, the German Luftwaffe decimated the Soviet air force. Their air superiority allowed them to bomb fuel and weapons reserves behind Soviet lines. Germany, along with Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Finland, marched into Russia rapidly, reaching Moscow and Leningrad by October. Most of the 3.4 million Red Army troops surrendered and were taken prisoner in 1940.

The tide turned for the Russians thanks to their Eastern reinforcements moving to the German front. Japan informed Russia that they were not going to attack them and would instead attack the United States, so Russia did not need strong defenses in the east. In addition, FDR signed lend-lease aid without the approval of Congress or the public, which supplied resources and weapons to Stalin. Through 1945, the Soviets pushed Westward toward Germany. Russian casualty rates were ten times that of the Germans, but the pure numbers advantage allowed them to sustain the offensive until the end of the war.

Stalin’s victory came at the cost of 30 million Soviet lives, 16 million of whom were civilians. In May 1945, the hammer and sickle was raised over the Reichstag. Germany was liberated from the Nazis but was now under a new tyrant. Germans were ethnically cleansed in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many were put into forced labor camps, and the Red Army left two million rape victims in their wake. Numbered among those victims were women liberated from Nazi concentration camps. The sentiment, for the most part, especially from Poles and Jews, was gratitude toward the USSR for their liberation. But this gratitude did not last long as looting, rape, and rape-murder by the Red Army spread. The Red Army claimed the mass looting as reparations. Industrial property was seized, and slave labor was used, all in the name of reparations approved by FDR and Churchill.

Communism began its rise in the East as well. Thanks to careful maneuvering, Stalin was able to establish Mao Zedong as the communist dictator in China. Mao held an imperial procession at Tiananmen Square in front of the Imperial Palace, declaring the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949.

In 1950, the PRC invaded Tibet and Korea. The battle between U.S.-backed Korean troops and Chinese-backed armies reached a stalemate at the 38th parallel, which, to this day, is the dividing line between North and South Korea.

In March 1951, a CCP general was assassinated, so Mao began his reign of terror. By 1954, 800,000 counter-revolutionaries had been killed, and Mao compared the joy of mass murder to a nice heavy rain. The CCP set up drop boxes where anyone could report anyone else for thought crimes and get them sent to reeducation or forced labor camps. Taoists and Chinese Catholics were relentlessly persecuted.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward was an effort to bring Chinese Communist development on par with the rest of the world. He set extremely ambitious goals, aiming to triple total output by mobilizing China’s 650 million people. Hundreds of thousands died merely digging soil. Mao then realized they would need Western technology to increase industrial output, so he began exporting agricultural products. To maximize food exports, he starved Chinese citizens, which led to the largest famine in human history. The death rate peaked at 29 percent in 1960, but in the Anhui province, 68 percent of the population died. Conservative estimates are that 32 million people died. Chen Yizi, a CCP researcher who managed to flee the country, estimated that up to 46 million may have starved during this period. The Soviets distanced themselves from China, and Nikita Khrushchev wrote in 1959 that “there was no excuse for the Chinese to be repeating our own stupid mistakes.”

After Stalin died in 1953, Communist inroads into Europe began to decline. His successor, Khrushchev, established a commission to investigate and condemn Stalin’s great terror, in which he himself had participated. Meanwhile, citizens in the occupied Soviet satellite states grew tired of Communist rule and revolted, resulting in crackdowns in Budapest, Poznań, and East Germany. While they were repudiating Stalinism in name, it was harder for the Soviets to do in practice and continue to maintain control.

Khrushchev next set his sights on the third world as a potential domain of influence. European empires were relinquishing control of their territories in Africa and the Middle East, creating a golden opportunity for Soviet expansion. By 1964, they had over 6,000 economic development projects. Vietnam, Cuba, and Chile were all converted to communist regimes. Chile’s communist dictatorship, however, was quickly deposed by U.S.-backed General Pinochet.

While the Soviet Communists had tempered their violent tactics at home, Mao remained ruthless. His Great Leap Forward caused so much starvation and death that he had to purge three million of his commissars. He eventually allowed limited private farming, only to ban it again in 1963.

In 1966, Mao invited more than a million children and teenage students to Tiananmen Square, urging them to overthrow all reactionary and bourgeois culture that may exist in China. Ritualized violence ensued. School employees, artists, and those with long hair or glasses were surrounded and tortured by mobs. Hundreds died each day. Churches and libraries were burned to the ground. Even cats were exterminated. Mao’s Cultural Revolution deepened the rift between Russia and China.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot and inspired by the Chinese Red Guard, took over during the Vietnam War, thanks to Chinese Communist support. People were deported from the cities, which were then razed. Every aspect of Cambodian tradition had to be destroyed. The death toll of the Khmer Rouge is still impossible to calculate, but it was doubtlessly genocidal, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) downplays its involvement. Estimates range from one to three million people died, about 40 percent of the population.

During the Cold War, the Soviets invested considerably in peace propaganda in the West. Soviet archives, opened in 1991, revealed that the Kremlin spent nearly $600 million on anti-nuclear propaganda and protests in America and Europe. It was an effort to disarm the West while the USSR grew its nuclear capabilities. The peace campaign was overshadowed, however, by protests in Poland.

As Poles faced unfair work treatment and declining living standards and were emboldened by the new Polish Pope, the Solidarity party rose up, boasting nine million members, and Polish workers went on strike. Pope John Paul II addressed 400,000 people in Warsaw, galvanizing millions against Communism. Russia was terrified by this development. Although the Polish Communist prime minister, Jaruzelski, begged the Red Army to invade Poland, Russia did not want to damage the peace movement. When he unsuccessfully instituted martial law on December 13, 1981, Polish communism crumbled.

As the USSR experienced increased resistance at home and abroad, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev saw that the planned economy was not working, but failed to understand why. He launched the Perestroika plan in 1986 to help the Soviet economy recover by introducing more liberalization. China engaged in a similar program.

By the time Mao died in 1976, China was poorer than it was in 1949. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, focused on appeasing both the U.S. and Russia while improving domestic central planning. After visiting the U.S. and Japan, Deng was awestruck with the economic and technological development of the capitalist world and wanted to imitate it. He established Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to allow private enterprise and investment from Japan and America. He established a systemic corporate espionage program to steal trade secrets from Japan and the United States. He also imposed the one-child per family policy in 1980. In 1983, China recorded 14 million abortions and 20 million sterilizations.

During Gorbachev’s visit to China in 1989, a massive student protest broke out in Tiananmen Square, drawing 1.2 million protesters. Deng declared martial law, sending out 50,000 soldiers, but there was a standoff. After a few weeks, he authorized force to restore peace and warned the protesters what was coming. For the next week, protesters who did not leave the square were mowed down by tanks and machine guns. Democratic reform was off the table in China.

In his Epilogue, McMeekin describes the non-death of Communism. In 1989, the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan and gave Eastern Bloc countries permission to go their way. Poland, Hungary, and East Germany threw off Communist rule. Thanks to former President Ronald Reagan’s undermining of the USSR by funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the USSR was unable to continue its extensive foreign policy interventions.

Communism relied on the sword to win, not the ballot box. The USSR crumbled because Gorbachev was unwilling to wield the sword unapologetically like his predecessors did. McMeekin writes:

• What made the USSR “Communist” is the same thing that defines the current governments of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba: rule by a single-party dictatorship that allows no legal opposition parties, that claims to direct and control the entire economy, that blankets society with all-encompassing rules and regulations, and that hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail. Who are we to argue that we know better than they do?

Today, China has the second-highest GDP in the world, competing only with the United States. However, their per capita GDP is five times lower than the U.S. per capita GDP. Chinese Communism does not have the same appeal for Western Communists that the Soviets did in the last century, with China’s human rights abuses out in the open. However, Western economic ties to China run far deeper than they ever did with the USSR. Many U.S. corporations outsource their manufacturing to China. Many Western entities are either controlled by or heavily influenced by China, from Walmart to Google.

Since 1989, American political support for the CCP has been bipartisan. The CCP has access to American markets without having to concede anything, a far cry from the diplomatic and trade agreements once made with the Soviet Union. Pressure on the Communists eased in the 90s and 2000s, as unrealistic expectations grew that they would Westernize. Rather, the opposite happened, with the Western world adopting more of China’s social control policies and invasive surveillance methods. Like China, the U.S. government meddles with the flow of information to control the narrative, and this was especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when surveillance, physical lockdowns, and government control of the narrative closed the distance between China and the West.

McMeekin warns that we face communist practices in the West. Thankfully, asset expropriation has not become normal, but Western liberal democracies engage in the same forms of social control as communist regimes, albeit through more insidious means.

Communism is a utopian ideology that aims to establish heaven on earth. All left-wing ideologies share this aim to one degree or another. The unfortunate aspect of utopianism is that it is unrealistic. People and their imperfections will always get in the way, so utopians may have to compromise. But do they? When it is not working, they can just start killing.

To read the entire book, go to Amazon.com to order!

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