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Book Review by Patrick van Schie
A fine addition to the comprehensive works on communism was published last year by American historian Sean McMeekin: To Overthrow the World. A fitting title, as communism does not merely mean revolution—though never in the form of a spontaneous uprising, but always involving the violence of either a coup or, more often, military conquest—but also the complete upending of normal societal structures. When communists come to power, all social institutions are destroyed, including the family. The more helpless an individual stands alone in the face of an all-powerful state—cut off from fellow citizens whose loyalty or betrayal remains uncertain—the more secure the communist party leadership’s grip on power becomes.
Part I of the book deals with communism in theory. One striking point is that Karl Marx was already a quarrelsome and unpleasant figure. Furthermore, Marx had no real trust in the ordinary worker as a revolutionary agent. His Russian follower, Lenin, was thus hardly original when he designated a small party elite as the “vanguard” of the communist movement, believing workers too “dumb” or short-sighted to recognize their so-called class interests. Lenin merely built upon the path Marx had laid.
As in his earlier book on the Russian Revolution (published in 2017), McMeekin highlights in Part II, which focuses on communism in practice, that within just two months of the Red Terror in the late summer of 1918—barely a year after the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power—they slaughtered nearly 15,000 opponents. This was more than twice the number executed by the Tsarist regime in the entire preceding century. And this was only the beginning of communist terror.
Even before that, after seizing power in Russia, the communists embarked on a large-scale looting spree. Ironically, they began in November 1917 by breaking a strike—specifically that of 6,000 bank employees in Petrograd (formerly and now again St. Petersburg). Just six weeks after their coup, they confiscated all private bank accounts with more than 5,000 rubles. A week later, smaller accounts were seized as well. Bank vaults were broken open and their contents looted. What followed was broader “nationalization.” Not just large industries, but also small shops and businesses were taken from their owners. As a result, industrial production by 1920 fell to just 18% of its 1913 level; iron ore production to 2.4%, cotton to 5%, and agriculture to 40%—and this was before collectivization had even begun.
Many still believe the peak of communist terror came in the second half of the 1930s. But even before that, in 1928 and 1929 alone, 2,687,000 (alleged) capitalists were arrested by the secret police (GPU) and dragged to the Gulag (concentration camps). There, they were used as slave labor under appalling conditions—most did not survive.
McMeekin also devotes attention to the immediate consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—the non-aggression treaty between Hitler and Stalin of August 23, 1939—which included a secret clause dividing Eastern Europe between the two dictators. Of the 13 million inhabitants of eastern Poland, which had been allotted to Stalin, 1.5 million were deported to the Gulag within the 18 months before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. In June 1940, the USSR, following the same secret clause, tore Moldova away from Romania. Of its 3.7 million inhabitants, 300,000 were sent to Gulag camps within six months.
After World War II, which was won on the Eastern Front not because of Stalin and the communists but despite them—thanks to ordinary soldiers—many more Central and Eastern European countries disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Communist puppet regimes were installed everywhere; no other political parties were tolerated except briefly during a transitional phase. Regardless of how much such a country had suffered under German occupation, or how much (or little) support communists had among the population, large-scale communist oppression took place—both in terms of human suffering and massive looting. For example, from Poland—which had suffered heavily under Nazi occupation—“reparations” amounting to 211,500 railcars full of stolen materials were shipped off by the Soviets.
Even more horrifying were the deportations of civilians. From Romania, 420,000 people were deported to Gulag camps; from Hungary, 600,000. In Bulgaria, the “liberation” by the Red Army was accompanied by 25,000 to 30,000 executions or disappearances in just two weeks. The Bulgarian communists then established 88 forced labor camps, where 184,000 “politically dangerous” individuals were forced into slave labor—ranging from officials of the deposed king’s regime to Orthodox priests.
But even these numbers pale in comparison to the mass killings carried out by communists in Mao’s China and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. In the latter, between 1975 and 1979, one-fifth to one-third of the population was murdered. Wearing glasses or owning a book was enough to be executed, as the Khmer Rouge considered it proof of “bourgeois” background. Even something as innocent as a man and woman briefly holding each other before being separated to labor in primitive rural conditions could lead to execution—for in this communist paradise, people were not allowed to love one another. That was deemed “bourgeois.” They were to love only the Party and its leader.
McMeekin’s book offers a strong overview of the forms and phases of oppression under communist regimes—in the Soviet Union and Europe, as well as in other parts of the world. He also covers the fall of communism in the Soviet empire and how Deng Xiaoping in China, despite his economic reforms, made it abundantly clear in 1989 that the communists would literally go over dead bodies to maintain their monopoly on power.
Surveys of communism often describe its “rise and fall.” McMeekin, however, adds a third clause in his subtitle: “and rise.” This does not just refer to the survival of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba, or the establishment of an oppressive communist regime by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—once celebrated by Western leftists who now remain silent. It also refers to the ease with which civil liberties were swept aside in Western countries during the COVID crisis. In effect, many Western countries copied the Chinese model. McMeekin, however, does not elaborate sufficiently on this. The second “rise” of communism should also include the orchestrated attack by extreme left-wing circles on Western values, our history, and the free-market economic system (“capitalism”). This remains unaddressed in the book.
What the surviving communist regimes—despite their differences—have in common with their predecessors, going back to the first communist state, the Soviet Union, is summarized in McMeekin’s fluently written book as follows:
“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’’
I would add: this applies to the majority of subjects under the more moderate forms of communist rule. For countless others, it has been—and still is—far worse: they were robbed, torn from their loved ones, forced into slave labor under horrific conditions, beaten in labor camps, tortured by secret police executioners, languished in cramped, filthy prison cells, and/or were murdered in the most gruesome ways. Tragically, in today’s communist states, this is far from a thing of the past.
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