Communism and the Cold War

Contents

About This Guide 3

1. What Is Communism? 5

2. Lenin and the Russian Revolution 7

3. Stalin 9

4. Mao and the People’s Republic of China 11

5. The Cold War in Europe 13

6. Communism in Asia 16

7. Cuba and Latin America 18

8. Espionage, Subversion, and the Cultural Front 20

9. How the Cold War Was Won 22

10. The Surviving Communist States 24

11. The Human Cost 26

12. Lessons for Today 28

Other Perspectives and Scholarly Debates 29

Sources 31

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About This Guide

This is the second in a planned series of fact guides for American families. Where the first volume took on a contemporary public-health crisis, this one tackles a subject that an alarming share of young Americans now know almost nothing about: communism, the seventy-year struggle to contain it, and the lessons that struggle taught the West.

Recent surveys by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation have found that roughly a third of Americans under thirty hold a favorable view of socialism, and meaningful percentages express favorable views of Marxism, Leninism, and even communism itself. Many cannot identify Stalin or Mao. Many have never heard of the Berlin Wall, the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, or the Cambodian killing fields. The students who inherit our country are increasingly being asked to evaluate political ideas about which they have been told nothing.

This guide aims to fix that, in plain language, with the central facts a literate citizen should know. It is not a textbook. It is not a partisan tract. It is a sober reminder that the twentieth century ran an experiment with this particular ideology, in country after country, on every inhabited continent, and that the results form one of the most fully documented disasters in human history.

A few principles shape the chapters that follow:

The historical record is the foundation. What happened under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims, and the Castros is documented in archives now open to scholars, in survivor memoirs, in declassified intelligence, and in court records of post-communist governments. The basic facts are not seriously disputed by serious historians. Particular numbers are debated; the existence of the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward famine, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian killing fields, and the East German Stasi state is not.

Theory and practice are connected. It is sometimes said that "real communism has never been tried." The same reply made by every defender of every failed utopia. The pattern of communist regimes — single-party rule, abolition of private property, suppression of religion, command of speech, secret police, mass camps — is too consistent across cultures, geographies, and decades to be coincidence. The features show up because they are required by the project.

The Cold War was won, and how it was won matters. The Soviet Union did not collapse on its own schedule for unrelated reasons. It collapsed because the West held firm for forty-five years — through containment, alliance, deterrence, economic competition, and moral clarity. The decisions made by Western statesmen and the courage of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain produced an

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outcome that was not predetermined. Future generations should know how this was done in case they need to do it again.

Communism did not end in 1991. Roughly a fifth of humanity still lives under nominally communist governments. Marxist ideas continue to circulate in Western academia and politics, often under new names. The reasons people were drawn to communism in 1917 — inequality, alienation, dissatisfaction with the existing order — have not disappeared. Knowing the actual record matters.

A note on tone: this guide does not euphemize. The regimes described here murdered their own people in numbers that strain comprehension. Some readers may find sections difficult. They are difficult because the events were difficult.

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1. What Is Communism?

Communism is both a political theory and a system of government. The two are connected but not identical. Understanding both is essential.

The theory. Modern communism descends from the writings of Karl Marx (1818– 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). The core argument runs as follows: human history is fundamentally a history of conflict between economic classes; capitalism, while a stage of progress beyond feudalism, produces deepening inequality and alienation; the working class (the proletariat) will eventually overthrow the owning class (the bourgeoisie); after a transitional period of "dictatorship of the proletariat," the state will wither away, classes will disappear, and a final stage of communism — a stateless, classless, propertyless society — will arrive. Private ownership of the means of production will be abolished. Goods will be distributed "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Religion, which Marx famously described as "the opium of the people," will fade because the conditions that produced the need for it will have ended.

The promise. Marxism offered something that secular ideologies rarely do: a complete worldview. It explained history, predicted the future, identified heroes and villains, and gave its adherents a sense of moral mission. It claimed the authority of science. It promised that justice was inevitable. For impoverished workers in nineteenth-century industrial cities, for educated young people horrified by inequality, for colonized peoples seeking liberation from European empires, the appeal was real and substantial.

The fatal assumptions. Several core Marxist predictions turned out to be wrong, and the wrongness of those predictions is what produced the disasters that followed.

Marx assumed economic life could be planned centrally as well as it could be coordinated by markets. It cannot. The price system, in a market economy, conveys information about scarcity, demand, and possibility — information that no committee, however brilliant, can replace. Every attempt to substitute central planning for prices has produced shortages, queues, misallocation, and stagnation. The economist Friedrich Hayek made this point in 1945 in an article called "The Use of Knowledge in Society"; subsequent decades confirmed it.

Marx assumed human nature could be remade. Religion, family loyalty, ethnic and national attachment, the desire to own and to bequeath, the reluctance to subordinate individual conscience to a party line — all of these were treated as artifacts of capitalism that would dissolve when material conditions changed. They did not. They proved durable across cultures and reemerged the moment political pressure relented.

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Marx assumed the dictatorship of the proletariat would be temporary. The party that seized power in the name of the workers would, on schedule, dismantle itself once the transition was complete. No communist party in history has ever voluntarily relinquished power.

Marx assumed that violence would be limited and short. The actual outcome, country after country, was systematic terror as the only available means of forcing diverse societies into a single ideological mold.

Communism, socialism, and the New Left. A note on terminology, because confusion here is widespread.

Communism refers specifically to Marxist-Leninist regimes and movements: the Soviet Union and its allies, the parties that took power in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and similar states. These regimes shared a common ideology, common organizational structure, and, for much of the twentieth century, common coordination through Moscow.

Socialism is a broader term covering many movements and parties, some Marxist and some not. Western European social democracy — the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democrats in Germany — accepted parliamentary democracy, private enterprise, and the rule of law while advocating for an expanded welfare state. These parties, whatever one thinks of their policies, did not produce gulags. The communist parties in those same countries, which sought a Soviet-style revolution, were a different matter.

The New Left refers to a Western intellectual movement that emerged in the 1960s, drawing on Marxist ideas while distancing itself from the Soviet Union, particularly after the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. New Left thinking has been influential in Western universities and is the matrix from which more recent ideological movements have emerged. Whether and how it should be classified alongside historical communism is a contested question.

The bottom line is that words matter. A young person who calls themselves a "socialist" today usually means something quite different from a Bolshevik in 1917. But the underlying ideas — about class, property, history, and the legitimate scope of state power — overlap considerably, and the family resemblances are worth understanding.

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2. Lenin and the Russian Revolution

In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated under pressure from a popular uprising and a war-weary military. A provisional government took office, intending to introduce parliamentary democracy. Eight months later, in October, a small disciplined faction called the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized control of the capital in a coup that involved a few hundred armed men. Within a few years, that faction had imposed itself on a country of 150 million people, abolished private property, executed the imperial family, banned all opposition parties, and built the institutions that would govern Russia for seven decades and define communism worldwide.

Lenin’s innovations. Marx had imagined revolution arising spontaneously from the working class in an advanced industrial country. Russia was neither. Lenin’s contribution to communist theory and practice was the vanguard party: a small, disciplined, professional revolutionary organization that would seize power on behalf of the workers, whether or not the workers were ready. This idea — that an enlightened minority could and should rule in the name of a class it claimed to represent — became the operating principle of every subsequent communist regime.

Lenin also insisted that revolution required terror. He wrote this explicitly. The Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, was established in December 1917, weeks after the Bolshevik takeover. Its first chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, declared that the new state stood for "organized terror" against its enemies. Within a year, executions were running into the tens of thousands. By 1922, when Lenin’s health began to fail, the basic architecture of the Soviet police state was in place.

War communism and the famine of 1921–1922. During the Russian Civil War (1918–1921), the Bolsheviks imposed "war communism" — wholesale nationalization, abolition of money in many transactions, and forced requisition of grain from the peasantry. The result was economic collapse and famine. Estimates of deaths from the 1921–22 famine range from 5 to 10 million. Lenin retreated tactically with the New Economic Policy, which permitted limited markets, but the lesson — that command of the economy produced ruin — was not absorbed.

The institutions Lenin built. When Lenin died in 1924, he left behind: a one- party state; a vast secret police apparatus; nationalized industry and banking; collectivized communications and press; a Communist International (Comintern) coordinating revolutionary parties around the world; and a doctrine that the use of any means against the regime’s enemies, including the systematic killing of class enemies, was justified by the historical mission. Stalin would inherit and expand all of this. None of it was Stalin’s invention.

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3. Stalin

Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death. The regime he built remains the central case for understanding what communism produces when given full scope.

Collectivization and the Holodomor. Beginning in 1929, Stalin moved to abolish private peasant farming and force the rural population into state-controlled collective farms (kolkhozes). Resistance was met with massive force. The most prosperous peasants — branded "kulaks" — were executed, deported to Siberia, or worked to death. In 1932–33, Stalin’s grain seizures and food blockades produced a catastrophic famine in Ukraine that killed approximately 4 million Ukrainians, with additional millions in Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, and other regions. The Ukrainian famine, known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "death by hunger"), was recognized as genocide by the European Parliament in 2022 and by the U.S. Congress in similar resolutions.

The Great Terror. From 1936 to 1938, Stalin conducted a series of purges that consumed the Soviet political, military, and intellectual elite. Almost the entire generation of Old Bolsheviks who had made the revolution were arrested, tried in show trials, forced to confess to fantastical crimes, and executed. The Red Army officer corps was decimated, with three of five marshals and most senior generals killed — a purge whose costs would be paid in the catastrophic early Soviet defeats of 1941. Total executions in 1937–38 approached 700,000, with millions more sent to the camps. Quotas for arrest and execution were issued from the center to the regions, with regional officials competing to overfulfill them. The arbitrary, statistical character of the terror is one of its most chilling features.

The Gulag. The Gulag was the system of forced-labor camps that grew steadily through the Soviet period and reached its peak under Stalin. At any given moment in the early 1950s, roughly 2 to 2.5 million prisoners were in the camps, with millions more cycling through. Conditions were lethal: inadequate food, brutal labor in arctic conditions, and routine murder. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973), based on his own imprisonment and hundreds of survivor testimonies, brought the reality of the system to Western readers. Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), drawing on archives opened after 1991, confirmed and expanded Solzhenitsyn’s account.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact. In August 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler that included secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe between the two dictatorships. In September, Germany invaded Poland from the west; the Soviet Union invaded from the east two weeks later. The two regimes cooperated in the partition of Poland and the deportation of its elites. The Katyn massacre — the execution of approximately 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and

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professionals by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 — was a direct product of this cooperation. The Soviet Union denied responsibility for Katyn until 1990. The Pact ended only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941; before that, Stalin had been Hitler’s most useful ally.

The Second World War and after. The Soviet Union bore enormous costs in defeating Nazi Germany — perhaps 27 million dead, the vast majority civilians. Soviet sacrifices were genuine and decisive. They were also achieved by a regime that imposed terror at home throughout the war, executed soldiers who retreated, treated returning prisoners of war as suspects, and used the postwar settlement to install communist governments across Eastern Europe — Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany — through a combination of military occupation, electoral manipulation, and selective murder. Winston Churchill described this in 1946 as the descent of an "iron curtain" across Europe.

By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union had become the second superpower, controlled an empire stretching from the Elbe to the Pacific, possessed nuclear weapons, and stood at the head of an international communist movement that included new revolutionary regimes in China, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

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4. Mao and the People’s Republic of

China

The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, fought a thirty-year struggle for power that culminated in October 1949 when Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China from the gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The defeated Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan. Mao would rule until his death in 1976. The death toll under his rule exceeds Stalin’s.

Land reform and early consolidation. From 1949 to 1953, the new regime confiscated land from approximately one million landlords, a substantial share of whom were executed in public meetings (douzheng) at which their tenants were required to denounce them. Estimates of landlord deaths range from 800,000 to 5 million. The campaign accomplished its stated goal — destruction of the rural class system — and its unstated goal: terror as a tool of social control.

The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Mao’s attempt to leap past Soviet-style industrialization through mass mobilization remains one of the most catastrophic policy decisions in history. Peasants were forced into massive communes, ordered to produce steel in backyard furnaces (the steel was useless), and pushed to produce vast nominal grain harvests that were then requisitioned by the state on the basis of inflated reports. The result was the largest famine in human history. Estimates of excess deaths range from 30 million to 45 million, with the most rigorous demographic analyses (notably Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine and the work of Yang Jisheng) clustering around 36–45 million. Western observers and even many Chinese officials minimized or denied the famine for decades. The Chinese government has not officially acknowledged the death toll.

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Having survived elite criticism for the Great Leap Forward, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge his rivals and reignite revolutionary fervor. He mobilized students into Red Guards who attacked teachers, intellectuals, and officials suspected of insufficient zeal. Universities closed. Cultural treasures were destroyed. Millions were "sent down" to the countryside for "reeducation." Estimates of Cultural Revolution deaths range from one to two million, with millions more imprisoned or persecuted. The Chinese Communist Party officially declared the Cultural Revolution a "decade of catastrophe" in 1981.

Tiananmen. In June 1989, the People’s Liberation Army crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Estimates of deaths in the crackdown range from several hundred to several thousand. The episode demonstrated that economic liberalization under Deng Xiaoping had not produced political liberalization, and that the Communist Party would use the army against

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its own citizens to maintain power. The Chinese government continues to suppress all discussion of Tiananmen, and many young Chinese today have never heard of it.

Contemporary China. Under Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, the Chinese Communist Party has reasserted ideological discipline, expanded internal surveillance to scales unprecedented in human history, conducted what Western governments have classified as a campaign of cultural genocide and forced labor against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, and ended the relative autonomy of Hong Kong. The mistaken Western hope of the 1990s and 2000s — that economic engagement would produce political liberalization — has been definitively disappointed.

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5. The Cold War in Europe

The forty-five-year contest between the United States and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union and its satellites on the other defined the second half of the twentieth century. The framing of "the Cold War" can obscure how genuinely dangerous it was: at multiple points the world came within hours of general nuclear war.

Containment. In 1946, the American diplomat George Kennan, writing from Moscow, sent what became known as the "Long Telegram," arguing that Soviet expansionism was rooted in the regime’s ideology and internal needs and would persist until the regime itself changed. The strategy of containment — preventing further Soviet expansion while waiting for the internal contradictions of the system to produce its eventual change — became the bipartisan foundation of American foreign policy through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In 1947, President Harry Truman pledged American support to free peoples resisting subjugation, beginning with aid to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan, announced the same year, provided $13 billion (about $170 billion in current dollars) in reconstruction aid to Western Europe. The plan was offered to Eastern European countries as well, but Stalin forbade their participation. The contrast — the recovery of Western Europe versus the stagnation of the East — became one of the most durable arguments against the Soviet system.

NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949, committed the United States, Canada, and ten Western European allies to mutual defense. Article 5 — the principle that an attack on one is an attack on all — has been invoked exactly once in NATO’s history: by the United States after September 11, 2001. NATO’s existence almost certainly prevented Soviet military expansion into Western Europe.

The Berlin Crises. In 1948, Stalin blockaded Western access to West Berlin, an enclave of allied control deep within Soviet-occupied East Germany. The Western allies responded with the Berlin Airlift, supplying the city by air for nearly a year until the blockade was lifted. In 1961, the East German regime built the Berlin Wall to stop the hemorrhage of its citizens to the West. The Wall remained the most visible symbol of communist tyranny for the next twenty-eight years.

Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968. In October 1956, Hungarians rose against their Soviet-imposed government, seeking democracy and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Soviet tanks crushed the uprising in November, killing several thousand Hungarians and triggering an exodus of 200,000 refugees. In 1968, the Czechoslovak Communist leader Alexander Dubček attempted to introduce

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"socialism with a human face." Soviet forces invaded in August. Both interventions made clear that the Soviet bloc was held together by force.

The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). The closest the world came to general nuclear war. The Soviet Union secretly deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba; the United States imposed a blockade and demanded their removal. After thirteen days of crisis, the Soviets withdrew the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a quiet removal of older American missiles from Turkey. President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis — firm but careful — became a model for crisis management.

Solidarity and the Pope. The election of the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in 1978 transformed the moral landscape of the Cold War. His 1979 visit to Poland, in which he spoke to millions of his countrymen about freedom and dignity, helped catalyze the Solidarity trade union movement led by Lech Wałęsa. Solidarity, the first independent organization in any communist country, was the wedge that eventually pried apart the Soviet bloc. The Polish regime imposed martial law in 1981 to suppress it, but the movement survived underground.

Reagan, Thatcher, and the End. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, broke with détente and pursued a strategy of confrontation: a major military buildup, support for anti-communist insurgencies (the Reagan Doctrine), the Strategic Defense Initiative, and explicit moral confrontation, including his 1983 description of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" and his 1987 demand at the Brandenburg Gate: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Margaret Thatcher in Britain pursued a parallel course. Pope John Paul II provided continued moral pressure from the third pillar of the Western coalition.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union and introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). His reforms, intended to save the Soviet system, instead exposed how rotten it had become. In 1989, the satellite regimes fell one after another — Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania — in a cascade no one had predicted. The Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989. The Soviet Union itself dissolved on December 25, 1991. The Cold War ended without the general war it had threatened to produce.

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6. Communism in Asia

The communist victories in China shaped the next phase of the Cold War, which moved increasingly to Asia.

The Korean War (1950–1953). In June 1950, North Korean forces, equipped and approved by Stalin, invaded South Korea. The United States, under United Nations authority, led an international force that eventually included troops from sixteen nations. After three years of brutal fighting in which approximately 36,000 Americans died — and an estimated 2 to 3 million Korean civilians — the war ended in an armistice that left the peninsula divided along approximately the prewar line. South Korea, then one of the poorest countries in the world, would become a democracy and one of the world’s most successful economies. North Korea, ruled by the Kim dynasty for over seventy years now, became the world’s most isolated and repressive police state. The two Koreas constitute the most complete natural experiment in twentieth-century political economy.

The Vietnam War. The longest of the Cold War’s hot conflicts. After the French withdrew from Indochina in 1954, Vietnam was divided between a communist North under Ho Chi Minh and a non-communist South. American involvement, beginning with advisors under Eisenhower and Kennedy, escalated to a full-scale war under Johnson. By the time of American withdrawal in 1973 and the fall of Saigon in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans had died, along with several million Vietnamese on all sides.

The fall of South Vietnam was followed by a wave of repression: hundreds of thousands sent to "reeducation camps," widespread executions of former officials, forced collectivization, and a refugee exodus — the "boat people" — in which an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese died at sea seeking escape. The notion popular in some Western circles in the early 1970s that the Vietnamese communists would prove benevolent rulers was definitively refuted.

Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. The most concentrated communist atrocity in history occurred in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, took power in April 1975. In the name of building a pure agrarian communism, the regime emptied the cities, abolished money, executed teachers and anyone wearing eyeglasses (taken as a sign of intellectualism), and worked or starved much of the population to death. Approximately 1.7 to 2 million people died in less than four years, out of a total population of 7 to 8 million — the highest proportion of any nation killed by its own government in the twentieth century. The Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979 by an invasion from communist Vietnam, in one of the few instances in which one communist regime’s atrocities were ended by another.

North Korea. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remains, as of this writing, the most fully communist state on earth — and the most repressive. The

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Kim dynasty (Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un) has ruled for three generations. The regime maintains a system of political prison camps in which an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 people are held under conditions documented by survivors and satellite imagery. A famine in the 1990s killed an estimated 600,000 to 2.5 million North Koreans while the regime continued to allocate resources to its military and to luxury imports for its elite. The country is closed to outside observation; what is known about it comes from defectors, satellite imagery, and intelligence assessment.

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7. Cuba and Latin America

The Cuban Revolution. In January 1959, Fidel Castro and his guerrilla movement overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt authoritarian who had nonetheless permitted significantly more freedom than what followed. Castro initially denied being a communist; within two years, he had nationalized American property, allied with the Soviet Union, and proclaimed Cuba a Marxist-Leninist state. Tens of thousands of Cubans were imprisoned or executed in the first years of the revolution; hundreds of thousands fled, mostly to Florida.

Cuba as Soviet base. Cuba’s strategic value to Moscow was enormous. The 1962 Missile Crisis was the most dramatic example, but Cuba also served as a base for Soviet-aligned revolutionary activity throughout Latin America and Africa for the next thirty years. Cuban troops fought in Angola and Ethiopia. Cuban intelligence trained guerrilla movements across the hemisphere. The romantic image of Che Guevara, manufactured in part by Western journalists, obscured the reality of an aggressive client state.

The cost of the revolution. Sixty-six years after Castro’s victory, Cuba remains one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Its political prisoners number in the thousands. Its dissidents are systematically harassed and frequently driven to exile. The mass migration of Cubans — by raft, by boat, through Mexico — continues to the present day. The 1994 Mariel boatlift, the 1994 balseros crisis, and the migration surges of the 2020s all reflect a population voting with its feet.

Latin America more broadly. Soviet- and Cuban-backed insurgencies operated in Nicaragua (the Sandinistas), El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru (Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path), Colombia (the FARC), and elsewhere. Some won power; most did not. The Sandinistas governed Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, lost a free election, and have since returned to power under Daniel Ortega in an increasingly authoritarian form. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro became the most prominent twenty-first-century example of how socialist policies, layered onto a one-party state, produce the predictable outcomes: hyperinflation, mass emigration, hunger, and the collapse of public services. Approximately 7 million Venezuelans have fled the country.

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8. Espionage, Subversion, and the

Cultural Front

The Cold War was fought militarily on the periphery and politically and culturally in the West itself. The communist movement maintained a sustained effort, well documented in declassified archives, to influence Western politics, science, and culture.

The Venona transcripts. From 1943 to 1980, American cryptanalysts worked to decrypt Soviet diplomatic and intelligence cables. The resulting "Venona" project, declassified in 1995, confirmed that the Soviet Union had run extensive espionage networks in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, including the penetration of the Manhattan Project and senior reaches of the State Department and Treasury. Venona corroborated the espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of Klaus Fuchs (the British scientist who delivered atomic secrets), and of Alger Hiss — cases that had been politically contested for decades. The historical record on these specific cases is now settled.

Active measures. The Soviet KGB and its successor agencies maintained a "Service A" devoted to active measures — disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing Western opinion, discrediting Western institutions, and manufacturing political controversies. Documented operations included the fabrication of the claim that AIDS was a U.S. biological weapon (Operation Denver, also called Operation Infektion), the forging of documents to embarrass Western leaders, and the support of front organizations across the political spectrum. Many techniques refined during the Cold War have been adapted by post-Soviet Russia, China, and other states.

Useful idiots and fellow travelers. Lenin is widely (though apocryphally) said to have referred to Western sympathizers as "useful idiots." The phenomenon was real regardless of the attribution. Throughout the twentieth century, Western intellectuals, journalists, and clergy traveled to the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, were given carefully managed tours, and returned home to assure their countrymen that the regimes were misunderstood and that reports of atrocities were exaggerated or invented. Walter Duranty’s New York Times coverage of the Soviet famine — for which he won a Pulitzer Prize that the Times has since acknowledged was undeserved — is one prominent example. Edgar Snow, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, and many others performed similar service for Mao’s China. The pattern of Western intellectual deference to communist regimes is itself part of the history.

The cultural Cold War. Recognizing the importance of the contest of ideas, the United States and its allies invested in cultural diplomacy: Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and a network of journals

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and exchange programs. These efforts, often controversial domestically, played a substantial role in keeping Western ideas alive behind the Iron Curtain and in equipping dissidents with the moral and intellectual resources they needed to survive. They are an important example of how the Cold War was won.

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9. How the Cold War Was Won

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not foreordained. It was the product of forty-five years of consistent Western policy combined with internal Soviet decay. Several elements were essential.

Economic competition. The Soviet system, despite its ideological claims, could not compete with market economies on standards of living. By the 1980s, ordinary Soviet citizens knew what they were missing. Western consumer goods, heard about over Western radio and seen in occasional travel and television, made the contrast unmistakable. Reagan’s military buildup forced the Soviet Union to spend resources it did not have on weapons systems it could not match. The Strategic Defense Initiative, however technologically uncertain, terrified Soviet planners.

Military strength. Containment required credible deterrence. NATO’s nuclear umbrella, conventional forces in Europe, and the willingness to use force when necessary (most clearly in Korea) prevented the Soviet expansion that ideology demanded.

Alliance maintenance. The Western alliance held together for forty-five years across difficult disagreements over Vietnam, Suez, intermediate-range missiles, and economic policy. This was not automatic. It required sustained American leadership and significant European resilience.

Moral clarity. Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II, Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, Sharansky, and many others insisted that the moral difference between free societies and totalitarian ones was real and worth defending. The détente school had argued that the Soviet system was simply different and that talk of evil was provocative. The events of 1989–91 vindicated the moralists.

Internal dissidence. The most important Cold War actors were not Western statesmen but Soviet and Eastern European dissidents — the writers of samizdat, the priests, the workers, the scientists, the human rights activists — who kept alive the idea of a free society within the totalitarian one. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 was driven from below. Western policy created conditions; the people of Eastern Europe made the choice.

Mistakes. The Western record was not unblemished. Support for various authoritarian governments in the developing world, justified at the time as bulwarks against communism, often proved both morally compromised and strategically counterproductive. The CIA’s involvement in coups, including Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, generated long-term consequences. American intervention in Vietnam exceeded what Vietnam’s strategic importance could justify, and the war damaged American confidence and standing for a generation. A serious account of the Cold War includes these failures.

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But the central fact remains: a contest between two systems was decided in favor of one of them, and the one that won was, by every measurable standard — life expectancy, income, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, human rights — the better system.

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10. The Surviving Communist States and

Their Heirs

In 2026, five states are governed by parties that style themselves communist: China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and North Korea. Each is worth a brief assessment.

China. The most consequential. The Chinese Communist Party governs a country of 1.4 billion people, the world’s second-largest economy, and a military whose modernization has steadily reduced the gap with the United States. Beijing’s strategic ambitions are no longer disguised: Xi Jinping has spoken openly of replacing the U.S.-led international order with a Chinese-led alternative. The combination of state-directed capitalism, ubiquitous surveillance, and Leninist political control has produced a system unlike anything else in history. Its long- term stability is uncertain; its short-term capacity to challenge Western interests is enormous.

Vietnam. A one-party state with a market-oriented economy. Hanoi has navigated relations with Beijing carefully, often aligning with the United States and other Asian powers against Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea. The political system remains authoritarian, but the contrast with North Korea is total.

Laos. A small, poor, single-party state in the orbit of both China and Vietnam.

Cuba. The economic crisis precipitated by the loss of Soviet subsidies in the 1990s has, despite limited reforms, never fully resolved. Mass migration continues. The political system has not opened.

North Korea. As described in Chapter 6: the most repressive regime currently in existence, possessing nuclear weapons.

Marxism in the West. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not end the influence of Marxist ideas in Western intellectual life. Various successor frameworks — critical theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, decolonial theory — share with classical Marxism several characteristic features: an emphasis on group identity and group conflict; a tendency to read all institutions as expressions of power relations; suspicion of liberal universalism; and a willingness to subordinate individual rights to collective claims. The intellectual genealogy is debated, and not every scholar working in these traditions would accept a connection. But the family resemblance, when one looks at the original texts, is real, and any honest survey should note it.

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11. The Human Cost

How many people were killed by communist regimes? The question is genuinely difficult and the answer genuinely contested, but the order of magnitude is not in serious doubt.

The Black Book of Communism. Published in France in 1997 and translated into English by Harvard University Press in 1999, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, edited by Stéphane Courtois, was the first systematic attempt to count the dead across communist regimes worldwide. Its widely cited estimate of 85 to 100 million includes:

• Soviet Union: approximately 20 million

• People’s Republic of China: approximately 65 million

• Vietnam: 1 million

• North Korea: 2 million

• Cambodia: 2 million

• Eastern Europe: 1 million

• Latin America: 150,000

• Africa: 1.7 million

• Afghanistan: 1.5 million

• International communist movement (not in power): about 10,000

The debate. The 100-million figure has been criticized on several grounds. Some critics object to the inclusion of famine deaths as direct crimes of the regime, on the grounds that famines have multiple causes. (The defense: when a regime causes famine through deliberate policy, refuses external aid, and continues to export food while its own population starves, the famine is the regime’s crime. The Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward famine, and the North Korean famine all meet this standard.) Some critics object to the inclusion of casualties of communist insurgencies that did not take power. Some methods of counting may double-count or include deaths whose attribution is contested.

The historian Mark Kramer of Harvard, who edited the English edition of the Black Book, has more recently estimated total unnatural deaths under communist regimes at "upward of 80 million." The political scientist R. J. Rummel estimated 110 million in 1994 and later revised the figure higher. Some critical scholars have argued for figures as low as 65 million if certain categories are excluded, while others have argued for figures above 100 million if all relevant categories are included.

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The bottom line. Whatever the exact number, communism in the twentieth century killed somewhere between 65 million and 100-plus million of its own subjects. This figure exceeds the total killed in both world wars combined. It dwarfs the death toll of any other ideology in modern history. It is one of the most fully documented mass tragedies of the human past.

The deaths were not concentrated in a single decade or a single country. They were spread across seventy years and four continents, under leaders who differed in temperament and intelligence but who built remarkably similar systems. The pattern is the indictment.

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12. Lessons for Today

What should an American family take from this history?

Ideas have consequences. Marx and Engels did not personally kill anyone; they wrote books. Lenin took the books seriously. Stalin took Lenin seriously. Mao took Stalin seriously. Pol Pot took Mao seriously. By the time the body count was tallied, ideas first sketched in mid-nineteenth-century reading rooms had cost more than 80 million lives. The intellectual tradition is part of the indictment, not separable from it.

Liberty is fragile and unusual. For most of human history, most people have lived under regimes that controlled what they could say, who they could marry, where they could travel, and what they could believe. The American constitutional order — a government of limited powers, with protections for speech, religion, property, and due process — is historically rare and historically recent. The American who treats liberty as the natural state of affairs is making the mistake of a fish that takes water for granted.

The middling virtues matter. Respect for the rule of law, suspicion of concentrated power, attachment to family and community, religious humility, the work ethic, the willingness to engage in voluntary association, the habit of self- government in town meetings and church congregations and voluntary associations of every kind — these are the qualities that Tocqueville observed in early America and that have proven, repeatedly, to be the foundations of free societies. Communism, in theory and in practice, sought to dissolve every one of these in favor of a single relationship between the individual and the state.

Skepticism toward utopian promises. The communist project was always offered as a solution to real problems. Inequality, alienation, the cruelties of industrial capitalism, the legacy of colonialism — these were genuine. The right response is incremental reform, civil society engagement, and trust in the cumulative wisdom of free institutions. The wrong response is to entrust an enlightened vanguard with the power to remake humanity. The lesson of the twentieth century is that the cure was vastly worse than the disease.

Memory is a duty. The Holocaust is taught in American schools, as it should be. Communist atrocities, several times more lethal in the aggregate, are often not. This asymmetry is not deliberate but it is dangerous. Young Americans should know the names: the Holodomor, Katyn, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields, the Stasi files, the Gulag. They are not abstractions. They are the reasons our grandparents made the choices they made.

Vigilance about the present. Communism as a fully articulated political program has limited appeal in the contemporary West. But the underlying impulses — to

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consolidate power in fewer hands, to silence dissent in the name of justice, to subordinate individual conscience to group identity, to rewrite history to suit current politics, to treat opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens — are perennial human tendencies. They are not unique to any party or any country. The constitutional order exists in part to restrain them. Defending the constitutional order, against pressure from any direction, is a job that does not end.

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Other Perspectives and Scholarly

Debates

In the spirit of intellectual honesty, this guide notes several points on which serious scholars disagree, including some who would dispute parts of the framing presented above.

Death toll methodology. The Black Book of Communism’s 85–100 million figure is widely cited but methodologically contested. Critics, including some of the Black Book’s own contributors (notably Nicholas Werth), have argued that the highest figures rest on questionable assumptions about how to count famine deaths and how to attribute responsibility. Lower estimates (in the 65–80 million range) exclude certain categories. Higher estimates (above 100 million) include them. Readers should be aware that any single number in this range reflects judgments about counting that reasonable people can dispute.

Causes of Soviet collapse. A genuine scholarly debate exists over the relative importance of Reagan’s military buildup, structural economic problems internal to the Soviet system, Gorbachev’s reform attempts, and the demonstration effect of a successful West. Strong cases can be made for each. The collapse was probably overdetermined.

The Cold War record of the West. Western Cold War conduct included episodes that are difficult to defend: support for various authoritarian regimes (Pinochet’s Chile, the Greek junta, Mobutu’s Zaire); the overthrow of elected governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954); the prosecution of the Vietnam War; harsh tactics in counterinsurgency. A complete assessment includes these. The argument made here is not that the West was perfect but that, on the central question, its system was a vastly better one to live under and to defend.

Marxism and its descendants. The argument that contemporary academic movements (critical race theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality) share important features with classical Marxism is contested. Many scholars working in those traditions reject the comparison. The argument is genuine but not consensus.

Cuba’s social indicators. Defenders of the Cuban Revolution often cite the country’s literacy rate and life expectancy. These are real achievements. Critics respond that pre-revolutionary Cuba had high indicators by Latin American standards and that the costs in liberty, prosperity, and migration far outweigh the benefits. The full record is more complicated than either side typically presents.

China’s economic record. China’s lift of hundreds of millions out of poverty since 1978 is real and significant. The conservative argument is that this occurred to the extent that the regime moved away from socialism toward markets and that its

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political features remain repressive. Defenders of the Chinese model argue for its replicability; the sustained Western argument is that the political costs are not worth paying.

These debates do not undermine the central historical record. They refine it.

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Sources

The principal works underlying this guide:

• Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, 1999).

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2003) and Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986).

• Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).

• Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (English edition 2012).

• Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (2005).

• Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime (1996).

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000), Stalin: A Biography (2004), Comrades!: A History of World Communism (2007).

• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999).

• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999).

• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005).

• John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005).

• George F. Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947).

• Mark Kramer, ed., American edition of The Black Book of Communism, ongoing scholarly work at Harvard.

• The Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project, archival materials.

• The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, ongoing research and survey work.

For current statistics on Cuba, North Korea, and China, sources include the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World, the Database of Religious Freedom, and the Uyghur Tribunal’s 2021 judgment.

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This guide is the second in a planned series. Other titles in development cover media bias,

the state of public education and the reading wars, the meaning of American patriotism, the case of Castro’s Cuba in greater depth, and questions of national defense in the nuclear

age.

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