Rarely is a historian’s account about any socio-economic or political phenomenon of enduring contemporary interest. In that sense, Sean McMeekin’s book “To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism” is rare. Why? It closes gaps in knowledge and understanding, busts myths, and offers context still missing in popular readings of communism, and the epoch-defining events it straddled in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

In surgical parlance, a recurring cancer can be of three kinds: local, if it reappears in the site of the anatomy first infected; regional, if it reappears near that site; distant or metastatic, if it attacks an entirely new area. McMeekin dons the garb of a sort of social oncologist. He examines a tenacious geopolitical cancer by starting with a question: “For many young westerners, communism is no longer a cause banished from mainstream discourse for its association with totalitarian regimes, for they have no living memory of them. Liberal democratic capitalism seems bereft of energy, if not moribund, while Chinese communism rapidly assimilates much of the world. How did this happen, and why did no one see it coming?”

The author then traces communism’s deceptively benign European origins, its snaking global growth, and its undeniably cancerous evolution.

Marx and Engels

Yes, centuries ago, Greek philosophers and Judeo-Christian-Abrahamic religious thinkers did exalt neighborly, egalitarian ideals. But it is 18th-century French thinkers, “inspired by their country’s potent revolutionary tradition, [who] created the vocabulary of modern socialism and anarchism.” And it is the more “systematic” German thinkers, such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, who refined it in the 19th century. Then, Russian demagogues Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin and Chinese enforcers Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping perfected it in the 20th century—and planted the seeds for its resurgence in the 21st.

McMeekin demonstrates Marx’s reasoning reeked of resentment. He sought to either capitalize on conflict or create it. His poetry, like his philosophy, was “angry and misanthropic,” driven by a “ruthless criticism of everything.” To him, it was all “just a word game,” “combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction.”

Fascinatingly, McMeekin reveals that, for Marx, anti-elite dogma and doctrine came first, even before he’d stepped foot in a factory or a remotely working-class setting. Marx teased out his theories first, then made real-world discourse resonate with his rabid rhetoric.

The author shows that, to Marxists, what mattered more than working-class fates was division and conflict. This transpires through war or revolution, or the control over people’s hearts, minds, and bodies. Russian communist Leon Trotsky embodied that spirit in a phrase he coined “permanent revolution.” What mattered to communists was “compulsory” labor, compulsory obeisance to the leader, compulsory this, that, and the other.

Communists did not believe in “doctrinal purity” in defense of a vulnerable or oppressed collective, but “personal dominance,” the enforcement of an individual’s will, and “the cult of personality.”

To McMeekin, a politburo reflected one person’s whim, not the people’s will. He recalls how a compendium of Mao’s quotations, the Little Red Book, bore this unsubtle inscription: “Read Mao’s book, listen to Chairman Mao’s words, act according to Chairman Mao’s instructions and be a good fighter for Chairman Mao.” Ultimately, personality mattered more than people. Or the party.

Exported, communism seldom stayed unchanged, often morphing into a more horrendous version of its former self. Under Cambodia’s terrifying Khmer Rouge, McMeekin says, communism harkened back to Marx’s “essentials, as a negation of everything existing.” It became and stayed “a war of the young on the old, a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery.”

Exploiting Freedom

Invariably, communism’s means seldom got in the way of its ruthless ends. Mao brainwashed children as Stalin did. Mao went further, inciting the young against everything and everyone old or old-fashioned, spurring them to denounce tradition and the past.

Marx and Engels saw no contradiction, McMeekin clarifies, in exploiting democratic principles of freedom of expression and a free press to get their “Communist Manifesto” widely published, translated, read, and discussed. As radicals in a tumultuous Europe, they saw no irony in seeking political refuge in a democratic Britain. Had Engel’s mother not suspected—then foiled—her son’s intentions, the duo might have succeeded even then in smuggling communism into America.

Like many of the aristocrats he loathed, Marx eventually inherited, rather than earned, his wealth, living his later years in relative luxury. McMeekin writes of Marx’s wife throwing a ball in their English villa, complete with “‘gold-rimmed invitations,’ ‘liveried servants,’ and a dance band.”

Marx’s ideas eventually engulfed large swathes of Europe and Britain, but it was Lenin’s and Stalin’s rabble-rousing in Russia and Mao’s iron hand in China that gave communism its militant edge. The turbulence of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions and two World Wars did the rest, mixing socialism, communism, Fascism, and Nazism in an ideological blender of sorts. As McMeekin notes, the USSR was the first government to sign a “non-aggression pact” with Nazi Germany.

Soviet Communism

How did Soviet communism inject Marxism into the global bloodstream? McMeekin elaborates. Soviet “domestic relations law” neutralized the legality of religiously blessed marriages. Secular civil ceremonies replaced church weddings. Mutual consent replaced substantive reasons for divorce. Convenience replaced commitment, first, in marriage, then in wider family life. This ethos of convenience led to the state subsidizing, not just legalizing, abortion.

Hypocrisy abounded. Lenin’s distrust of peasants and workers, whom he claimed to represent, led him to control and monopolize all areas of society, including the media, education, and culture so as to insert communist propaganda. Although not widely publicized, joining Moscow’s project to internationalize communism meant that global political parties received access to Moscow funds, which could be used to incite protests and civil unrest.

Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” (NEP) embraced capitalism when it suited him, such as when he had to revive a flagging economy. Likewise, Stalin’s “collectivization” entailed seizing of public resources (people, land, goods, services) to try and show the capitalist West that communism could create a mightier agricultural, industrial, and military power, and more enviable development indices: employment, literacy, production. Never mind that “nearly all of Stalin’s great new industrial works were modeled on or designed by Western capitalist firms.”

An Astute Joke

McMeekin writes of a joke. Russian communist leader Leonid Brezhnev proudly shows his mother his luxurious hunting lodges and dachas, only for her to whisper, “Well, it’s good, Leonid. But what happens if the Communists come back?”

In soft-power one-upmanship too, the Eastern Bloc stopped at nothing. McMeekin recounts how they elasticized doping regulations to institutionalize use of otherwise dangerous, performance-enhancing, anabolic steroids on their own Olympics athletes, to guarantee a more mountainous medal haul.

It worked. Barring the 1984 Games that the Eastern Bloc boycotted, this crossed an inexcusable span of nearly 40 years, throughout the Cold War Olympics from 1952 to 1988. Eastern Bloc countries won a little over 97 percent of gymnastics medals and 98.21 percent of gold medals.

Left-leaning Western press sensationalized the handful of Western athletes such as Ben Johnson and Florence Griffith Joyner, alleged to have bent or broken regulations, but glossed over the Eastern Bloc’s “industrial-scale state cheating.”

Calling out a complicit media, McMeekin explains how Western sympathizers of communism cemented its local acceptability and global rise. He cites Walter Duranty and Edgar Snow as influential but hypocritical journalists, who whitewashed communist sins before the world.

Others blamed atrocities in Vietnam and Cambodia on the United States and elsewhere. So, Cambodian genocide was dismissed as a sad, unintended fallout of “the proxy war in Vietnam, rather than genuine communism in practice.” Stingingly, McMeekin explains, “The Cold War was still on … and in press-friendlier spheres of international competition such as the Olympics, the arms race, and the convening of ‘peace congresses’ and ‘nuclear freeze’ demonstrations against American (but not Soviet) missiles, the Communists were winning.”

‘Non-Aligned’ Former Colonies

Ironically, with the coming of the Cold War, Communist influence only grew. Former colonies of European powers, shaking off their imperial yokes, were content to remain officially “non-aligned” with both America and the Soviet Union, while greedily soaking up Soviet financial, industrial, agricultural, and cultural largesse. Third world countries made arms deals in the 1960s with the Soviet Union as part of 6,000+ economic projects. Eventually, Communist tentacles grasped large parts of South America, Africa, and Asia, largely unchallenged.

McMeekin spotlights how communist states such as Bulgaria, peddled “secularized state education and feminism” to win over Western progressives. Others, like Deng Xiaoping’s China, used large-scale industrial espionage to circumvent intellectual property law, just to try and beat Japan and America in the technology sweepstakes.

Unlike Russia’s Gorbachev, however, China’s Deng didn’t concede an inch of space in political liberalization, even while he bettered Gorbachev’s generosity in levels of economic, industrial, and technological liberalization. McMeekin implies that this communist deal, with the otherwise reviled capitalist devil, helped China become the overwhelming communist superpower in the 21st century that Russia had been in the 20th.

Part 2 of this two-part book recommendation explores McMeekin’s portrait of the alleged death and rebirth of communism.

’To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism’ By Sean McMeekin Basic Books, Sept 10, 2024 Hardcover: 544 pages

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