Introduction to Chapter 21

CHAPTER 21

Revolution, Socialism, and Global Conflict

The Rise and Fall of World Communism 1917–present

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Lenin Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was the Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution. He became the iconic symbol of world communism and in his own country was the focus of a semi-religious cult. This widely distributed Soviet propaganda poster reads, “Lenin lived; Lenin lives; Lenin will live.” Private Collection/RIA Novosti/Bridgeman Images

Global Communism

Revolutions as a Path to Communism

Russia: Revolution in a Single Year

China: A Prolonged Revolutionary Struggle

Building Socialism

Communist Feminism

Socialism in the Countryside

Communism and Industrial Development

The Search for Enemies

East versus West: A Global Divide and a Cold War

Military Conflict and the Cold War

Nuclear Standoff and Third-World Rivalry

The Cold War and the Superpowers

Paths to the End of Communism

China: Abandoning Communism and Maintaining the Party

The Soviet Union: The Collapse of Communism and Country

Reflections: To Judge or Not to Judge

Zooming In: Anna Dubova, a Russian Peasant Girl and Urban Woman

Zooming In: The Cuban Revolution

Working with Evidence: Poster Art in Mao’s China

An upstanding Soviet citizen entered a medical clinic one day and asked to see an ear-and-eye doctor. Asked about his problem, the man replied, “Well, I keep hearing one thing and seeing another.”

A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Soviet Russian are admiring a painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Frenchman says, “They must be French; they’re naked and they’re eating fruit.” The Englishman says, “Clearly, they’re English; observe how politely the woman is offering fruit to the man.” The Russian replies, “No, they are Russian communists, of course. They have no house, nothing to wear, little to eat, and they think they are in Paradise.”

These are two of an endless array of jokes that had long circulated in the Soviet Union as a means of expressing in private what could not be said in public. A major theme of those jokes involved the hypocrisy of a communist system that promised equality and abundance for all but delivered a dismal and uncertain economic life for the many and great privileges for the few. The growing disbelief in the ability or willingness of the communist regime to provide a decent life for its people was certainly an important factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of communism in the land of its birth. Amid that disillusionment, it was hard to remember that earlier in the century communism had been greeted with enthusiasm by many people—in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere—as a promise of liberation from inequality, oppression, exploitation, and backwardness.

Communism was a phenomenon of enormous significance in the world of the twentieth century. Communist regimes came to power almost everywhere in the tumultuous wake of war, revolution, or both. Once established, those regimes set about a thorough and revolutionary transformation of their societies—“building socialism,” as they so often put it. Internationally, world communism posed a profound military and political/ideological threat to the Western world of capitalism and democracy, particularly during the decades of the cold war from the late 1940s through 1991. That struggle divided continents, countries, and cities into communist and noncommunist halves. It also prompted a global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) for influence in the Global South. Most hauntingly, it spawned an arms race in horrendously destructive nuclear weapons that sent schoolchildren scrambling under their desks during air raid drills, while sober scientists speculated about the possible extinction of human life, and perhaps all life, in the event of a major war.

Then, to the amazement of everyone, it was over, more with a whimper than a bang. The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the collapse of communist regimes or the abandonment of communist principles practically everywhere. The great global struggle of capitalism and communism, embodied in the United States and the Soviet Union, was resolved in favor of the former far more quickly and much more peacefully than anyone had imagined possible.

A MAP OF TIME
1917 Russian Revolution
1921 Founding of Chinese Communist Party
1929–1953 Stalin in power in Soviet Union
1934–1935 Long March in China
1945–1950 Imposition of communist regimes in Eastern Europe
1949 Communist triumph in China
1950–1953 Korean War
1958–1961 China’s Great Leap Forward and massive famine
1959 Cuban Revolution
1962 Cuban missile crisis
1965–1973 U.S.-Vietnam war
1966–1976 China’s Cultural Revolution
1968 Prague Spring: communist reform movement in Czechoslovakia
1975–1979 Genocide in communist Cambodia
1976–early 1990s Deng Xiaoping and beginnings of communist reforms in China
1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
1985–1991 Gorbachev reforms in USSR
1989 Collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe
1991 Disintegration of Soviet Union
1990s Economic contraction in the former Soviet Union and economic expansion in China
2007–2009 Communist North Korea acquires nuclear weapons
2008 Fidel Castro steps down as leader of communist Cuba
2014 United States proposes to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba

SEEKING THE MAIN POINT

What was the appeal of communism, both in terms of its promises and its achievements? To what extent did promises match achievements?