Communist Century

Chris Kostov

Description

From the very origins of the communism, in the radicalised European working class movements of the late 19th Century, a vast an complex ideological movement that would eventually dominate much of humanity a century later emerged. The 20th Century was communism's century, a belief system that promised utopia managed instead to spread terrific suffering and bloodshed in its wake. The expansion of communist revolutions around the world after the two world wars, communism's first state in Russia, Stalinism and the dictator's empire in Eastern Europe and the influence of communism in China, Asia, South America and Africa are all covered here in this short introductory guide by Chris Kostov. For those who are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of 20th Century history, or for students who want a better grasp of the broad scope of change during the century, this is an indispensable guide.20th Century Lives is a new series from Explaining History, taking pivotal figures from the last century and exploring their legacies in an accessible and concise way; ideal for history enthusiasts, students and first time readers of modern history.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Revolutions
• Revolution

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785382178
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
THE COMMUNIST CENTURY
From Revolution To Decay: 1917 to 2000
By Chris Kostov
www.explaininghistory.com



Publisher Information
Published in 2015 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Chris Kostov to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2015 Chris Kostov
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.



Introduction
It is quite curious how communism emerged from utopian ideas for abso-lute equality and classless society, shared by various philosophers through the ages, to a detailed sociopolitical and economic ideology developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century and how this ideology turned into a totalitarian system which controlled the destinies of 1/4 of the world’s population at its peak. The confrontation between the communist and non communist worlds became the defining ideological struggle of the 20th Century, and it generates no shortage of important questions for us. Among the many issues surrounding the rise and fall of communism are: How and why communism collapsed across the globe? What are the different variations/deviations of the communist ideology? Why was it condemned by many democratic countries as a criminal political regime? What were the major features and crimes of these communist regimes? Why many western intellectuals embraced and then abandoned the communist ideology? And why is there nostalgia towards communism in the former communist countries? This book attempts to answer these and other questions surrounding communism by analysing the key points and events in its development and demise. Therefore, this book is more like a guide than an encyclopaedia of communism and its aim is to give the necessary background for further readings.
More than 20 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and many key documents about various aspects of the communist regimes have been declassified making research on communism much easier than ever before. On the one hand this distance in time and new primary sources allow historians and other researchers including the author of this book to be able to have a more impartial look at the events of the recent past but on the other hand, we can observe an increasing number of attempts of prominent communists in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia and other countries to whitewash the crimes of the communist dictatorships. These latter attempts rely on the lack of recent popular books and other sources in the West and even in the former communist countries which aim to offer a non-ideological but global look at the communist regimes and heritage and the impact of communism on the 20th century history. Certainly, no book or author can claim to be completely impartial and objective and I will not dare to impose such a claim. I will try, however, to present the history of communism in such a way that allows the facts and major events to talk more than my own emotions or the emotions of any other historian who has ever dealt with the topic. Certainly, it is very hard to talk or write about communism when many of its victims, perpetrators and witnesses are still alive and emotionally involved with it but it is my duty as a historian and expert on modern Central and Eastern Europe to face this challenge. I hope that this book will provoke the interest and curiosity of many readers to go further and explore in more detail the impact of communism on the 20th century. I also strongly encourage everybody who is interested into communism and how it really works to read Animal Farm by George Orwell (1903-1950), who managed to summarise the whole communist ideology with the shortest perfect description: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”



Chapter One
The Emergence of Communism in the 19th Century
The idea of a classless society based on common ownership and equality did not appear in the 19th century. As early as the 6th c. BCE, the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (ca. 570 BCE - ca. 495 BCE) founded in Crotone, southern Italy a community of like-minded philosophers who wanted to establish a just and classless society. This idea influenced another ancient Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 428 BCE-ca. 348 BCE) who went even further and wrote in his treatise The Republic that in the ideal society people would share not only their property but also their spouses and children. Later, the Essenes - a Jewish sect which was popular between the 2nd c. BCE and 1st c. CE also proclaimed communal ownership as well as some early Christian groups. Such Christians claimed that private property was evil and quoted the New Testament to prove that Jesus Christ wanted egalitarianism, disapproved of money-changers, tax collectors and other well-off people and even called them thieves. These Christian communist ideas became very popular among Manicheans, Gnostics, Cathars, Bogomils and other early medieval Christian sects. The Bogomils, who emerged as a sect in the 10th c. CE spread their teachings from Bulgaria across the Balkans to Italy and France, believed that everything material had come from the devil. Other notable examples from antiquity include the Spartacus slave revolt for equal rights in 73-71 BCE which impressed Soviet and East European communists so much that a number of Russian and other East European athletic clubs are still called Spartacus (Spartak in Russian), as well as the Mazdak movement in 5th c. Persia which also demanded communal ownership.
The peasants in medieval Europe shared the manorial landholding system. Similar systems prevailed in Japan and India too. Under the manorial (known also as seigniorial) system the peasants held land from the lord, cultivated their fields together and had communal use of the village property. Feeling that these common rights were threatened, many peasants joined the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England and the Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 in Germany. The leader of the German peasant insurgents Thomas Münzer (1489-1525) openly rejected private property and established a communist egalitarian society in the small town of Mühlhausen, Thuringia, which lasted only for a year until Münzer’ s execution. The Protestant sect of the Anabaptists picked up Münzer’s egalitarian ideas and tried to uphold them in southern Germany and Switzerland but they were severely persecuted by both Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants because of their rejection of private ownership. During the English Civil War (1642-1651) there were also some political and religious groups such as the Levellers and the Diggers who demanded an egalitarian society. The Diggers attempted to put their ideas into practice by farming on common land. The 16th and the 17th centuries were also the time when Thomas More (1478-1535) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) wrote their famous works Utopia and The City of the Sun. More imagined in his Utopia a perfect utopian egalitarian society in which everybody was equal except the atheists who were tolerated but distrusted. Campanella reinstated Plato’s ideas for a perfect egalitarian society in The City of the Sun where all people lived and worked in a city with a perfect climate and living conditions and shared their property, wives and children under the supervision of officials who made sure that the distribution was just and fair .
The 18th and 19th centuries, however, were the time when modern capitalism emerged, thanks to the increasing industrialisation in Western Europe. The poor working and living conditions of the workers in the new factories made European workers and poor people in general much more responsive than ever before to communist and other egalitarian ideas which promised them radical distribution of property and wealth. The French Revolution of 1789 brought messages for economic justice and some French revolutionaries such as Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) and François-Noël (known as Gracchus) Babeuf (1760-1797) called for the equal redistribution of wealth among all French people. Babeuf even organised in 1796 his secret revolutionary faction Conspiracy of the Equals, which aimed to establish a new political regime based on common ownership of all property. Babeuf was arrested and executed in 1797 but his ideas inspired a number of other French thinkers and revolutionaries in the 19th c. such as: Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Louis Blanc (1811-1882), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) and the British social reformer and pioneer in the cooperative movement Robert Owen (1771-1858). Thinkers such as Saint-Simon and Proudhon constantly talked about their visions of a just egalitarian society and the evils of private property. Robert Owen established in 1825 a self-sufficient cooperative agricultural-industrial community called New Harmony in Indiana but it eventually failed due to persisting disagreements among its members. Cabet and Fourier also inspired the launching of various settlements in the USA based on their ideas of communal property.
The English follower of Robert Owen, John Goodwin Barmby (1820-1881) founded in 1841 the London Communist Propaganda Society and claimed that he coined the term communism in 1840 after his conversations with French revolutionaries but most probably b