Sean McMeekin has produced a detailed, fascinating, and highly readable history of the rise and fall of communism. The “rise and fall and rise” of the book’s subtitle refers to the historic rise and fall of communist governments and the subsequent rise of a surveillance state that owes a lot to communist methods of control. Communism has a continuing appeal based on idealism and the desire for power; as young idealists continue to believe in the brotherhood of man, sexual and racial equality, and “social justice,” and as long as older politicians are willing to play into these beliefs for the purposes of acquiring greater power through an all-encompassing state, communism will continue to have some form of popular currency.
It is striking how much in common Marx appears to have with today’s leftists. A sort of eternal student supported by the money of others, Marx had never met any factory workers or set foot in a single factory when he began to write about the proletarian revolution.
Other dissidents had a better grip on reality. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicted with stunning accuracy what a communist state would look like. After a communist revolution, said Bakunin, the leaders of the communist party would
concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision. They will create a single state bank, concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production, and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class.
The goal of Marx’s revolutionaries, said Bakunin, “was to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorships on their ruins.” These new dictatorships would be “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world.”
The principal events of the Russian Revolution are familiar to most, but McMeekin highlights just how far the Communists went in invading the private lives of Russian citizens. In need of money, the new government demanded access to people’s bank accounts and safe deposit boxes. On January 4, 1918 for example the government ordered that
Owners of safes Nos. 1 to 100 at the said banks are to appear with their keys at 10 a.m. Safes belonging to those not presenting themselves within three days will be opened . . . each bank with a view to the confiscation of the contents.
Later a whole branch of the bank commissariat was established devoted to breaking into people’s safes.
The crimes of Stalin are similarly well known, but McMeekin highlights interesting details such as how Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and grand industrialization projects were modeled on or designed by Western capitalist firms. The State Institute for the Design of Metallurgical Factories in Leningrad had a state monopoly, but its engineering work was carried out by the Freyn Engineering Company of Chicago. Magnitogorsk, the model Soviet industrial city with the country’s largest iron and steel works, was designed by the Arthur G. McKee Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio. The four main Soviet cement combines were constructed under the supervision of the MacDonald Engineering Company of Chicago. A giant hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River was designed and built by a New York engineering firm. The bauxite and aluminum industries, crucial in the construction of Soviet tanks and warplanes, were designed by the American Alcoa Corporation. Americans were essentially building the war machine of the country that, in the post-war era, would become their greatest geopolitical rival.
Indeed, it was in the most brutal era of Soviet Communism, the era of “dekulakization,” the Ukrainian Holodomor, and the Great Terror that communism was most praised and admired in the West. It was Trotsky who coined the term “fellow travelers” to describe western intellectuals who never joined the Communist Party but nonetheless sung communism’s praises. Many of these intellectuals praised Soviet foreign policy for its “anti-fascism.” This was the era of the Popular Front strategy, seen at its apogee in the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades.
This was also the time when Walter Duranty of the New York Times was given the Pulitzer Prize for denying that the Ukrainian famine, in which around five million Ukrainians starved to death, was real. In 1936 President Roosevelt removed William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Moscow, because he had become too critical of Stalin’s show trials. Bullitt was replaced by Joseph Davies, who described Stalin as “a greater leader than Catherine the Great, than Peter the Great, a greater leader even than Lenin.” Roosevelt’s undersecretary of state sought to purge the State Department’s East European Affairs Division of “Stalin-phobes.” It is estimated that there may have been as many as 329 paid Soviet spies working in the U.S. government at this time. This was also the heyday of Soviet espionage in Britain, with the “Cambridge Five” spy ring infiltrating the Foreign Office, MI6, the BBC, British army intelligence, and the War Office.
McMeekin further dispels the myth that the Soviet Union was virtually defenseless when it was attacked by Hitler in 1941. The USSR was heavily arming all through the 1930s and by 1941 was, in fact, better armed than Germany. The 1939 partition of Poland was Stalin’s idea, not Hitler’s.
The author also cuts through much of the mythology surrounding Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who presided over the demise of communism and the Soviet Union. These were not Gorbachev’s goals—quite the opposite. The policies of glasnost and perestroika were intended to preserve the communist system. McMeekin says of Gorbachev, “His main objective was thus to revitalize the Soviet economy in order to ramp up military spending.” By the late 1980s, the USSR was producing 450 percent more tanks than the United States and three times as many nuclear submarines. Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev ordered brutal crackdowns against protesters in the USSR’s constituent republics.
McMeekin chillingly concludes by showing how far the methods of the communist police state have been adopted in Western democracies in recent years. The measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 such as lockdowns and social distancing were originally policies of the Chinese Communist Party. This was openly admitted by the chief British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. The phenomenon of “debanking” political dissidents is also reminiscent of Chinese Communist practices. McMeekin sees the Western world as converging on a “a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life. . . . Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started,” he concludes.
