A quarter-century ago, most Westerners assumed that communism was all but dead. A few stragglers (notably China) still clung to the label, but these were seen as the final foot-draggers, already in the process of shedding their repressive ways. Free and democratic societies were the new norm. The prevailing sentiment of the day was expressed very memorably in Joshua Muravchiks 2002 Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. “After so much struggle, and so many lives sacrificed around the world,” Muravchik wrote, “socialism’s epitaph turned out to be: If you build it, they will leave.”

　　If only he had been right. With China doubling down on one-party rule, deepening alliances with Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and accumulating enough wealth and military might to represent a major global threat, Muravchik’s eulogy now seems premature.

　　He was right about some things, though. Autocratic regimes with centrally planned economies dont persist because people like living in them. They are always deeply unpopular. Karl Marx claimed that capitalism would leave the working class miserable and marginalized, but in reality, it was communism that brought previously unimaginable levels of bloodshed, brutal repression, and mass starvation in its wake, even as Marx’s “immiseration thesis” was resoundingly disproven time and again across a kaleidoscope of cultures. The verdict is in: freedom is clearly better. So why is communism making a comeback?

　　This question frames Sean McMeekin’s impressive new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. It’s a wonderful read by an engaging writer with a deep knowledge of the relevant history. The 462 pages fly by. Readers may feel a certain dissatisfaction at the end, however, reflecting that they understand the first rise of communism considerably better than the second. This is understandable; like everyone else, McMeekin may still be reeling a bit from the geopolitical twists and turns of the last two decades. Who does understand this with confidence? What McMeekin can offer is a re-examination of communism’s history, with an eye to spying those genetic elements that have given it such unexpected longevity. It’s something.

　　The Rise

　　Communism’s surface appeal is not so hard to explain. The modern world has seen dramatic gains in prosperity, along with falling levels of social cohesion. Food and shelter are easier to come by today, but people crave solidarity and a greater sense of security. Communism promises both.

　　Muravchik’s book explored socialism from this angle, essentially presenting it as a political religion built on false promises. In his historical narrative, socialism looks a bit like a virus that becomes less lethal over time as it mutates and spreads. Beginning with industrial-strength Leninism and Stalinism, communism initially wrought horrific destruction, but in time it foundered against the rock of reality. Less radical solutions (labor unions, welfare) to its motivating problems undercut its appeal, and by the turn of the millennium, it had mostly petered out, with the mantle passing gently to social democrats like Tony Blair, who willingly gave thanks for the blessings of capitalism.

　　Today that narrative looks decidedly incomplete. Communism’s track record has not improved; it claimed 94 million lives in the twentieth century, and the horrific crimes of Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge (among many others) are now well-established in the historical record. These appalling numbers are not balanced out by any noteworthy success stories. Central economic planning doesn’t work; one-party rule reliably gives rise to political oppression. Nevertheless, a recognizable (malign) political tradition lives on, running from Marx through the Bolsheviks and Stalin, and continuing its evolution in China with Mao, Deng, and Xi Jinping. Whether we call it ”communism” or coin a new term, there is clearly a continuity to this story that merits attention.

　　In the Bolshevik takeover we see two of communism’s most important and defining features. It is immensely appealing to ruthless, power-hungry geniuses. And it feeds on chaos and human misery.

　　In attempting to trace that thread, McMeekin shifts his focus. To Overthrow the World is not a morality tale about the malign consequences of beguiling-but-bad ideas. Instead, McMeekin explores another recurring feature of global communism: brute force. He notes that communism never really wins over entire populations through persuasion. Communists do not win free and fair elections. Instead, their leaders court small, disaffected, and ideally well-armed groups, converting them into the shock troops that are needed to impose totalitarian control on a larger population. That grip is then maintained through fear, lies, and cronyism. Though the ideology stresses solidarity with the common man, the reality of communism inevitably involves top-down repression of the many by a privileged few.

　　Very few of the workers of the world wish to unite around that goal. Vladimir Lenin’s “vanguard” strategy compensated for that by allowing a chosen few to usher in a glorious new communist era, permitting the general populace to thank them later. He paired this with a strategy of “revolutionary defeatism,” wherein communist recruits were encouraged to undermine their governments or (especially) national armies in hopes that disorder and crushing defeat would open a space where communism could take root. Here, already, we see two of communism’s most important and defining features. It is immensely appealing to ruthless, power-hungry geniuses. And it feeds on chaos and human misery.

　　Lenin himself offered a master class in revolutionary defeatism in 1917, by courting German assistance so that he could return to Russia and sabotage her World War I campaign. Back in the (soon-to-be) USSR, Lenin fired up the German-subsidized printing presses and began blitzing the Russian troops with communist propaganda, persuading them to turn against their leaders. As her army imploded, Russia was forced to withdraw from the war, opening a path for the Bolsheviks to seize power. This turn of events was particularly stunning because, as McMeekin reminds us, the initial phase of the Russian Revolution had very little to do with the Bolsheviks. Lenin was in Switzerland when tensions between the tsar and other internal factions came to a head, and up through that point, Russia had largely been viewed by Marxists as a backward, reactionary country with limited promise. Lenin was never as such determined to bring proletarian honor to his own countrymen. He simply saw a crisis brewing, and pounced.

　　He paid the price for his cynical opportunism in 1918, when newly communist Russia was forced to sign the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty, relinquishing control of Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the Caucuses. Still, the communists had their country, and luckily for them another catastrophic war was fast approaching that would enable Lenin’s successor to throw more than thirty million men into Hitler’s teeth, claiming dominion over the devastation that followed on this clash of totalitarians. Once again, the pattern repeats. Communism attracts men who are ruthless, depraved, and highly innovative. Just as Lenin leveraged the first World War for his ends, Stalin was able to leverage the second, positioning himself favorably to solidify power, regain the territory his predecessor had lost, and even cast himself as a global hero for vanquishing the mid-twentieth-century’s other ruthless tyrant.

　　The Fall

　　The Bolsheviks’ early days in power were rough. The bankers stalwartly refused to cooperate with the Revolution, so the newly-established communists were immediately forced to turn their attention to strikebreaking. Russians died by the millions of starvation and cold, to the point where Lenin permitted Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration to intervene in 1921 (undoubtedly saving a huge number of lives). It quickly became apparent that a centrally planned economy meant dysfunction, hunger, and shortages of more or less everything. A sober-minded Westerner visiting Russia in the early 1920s would likely have been amazed to know that Lenin’s crackpot experiment would ultimately span several decades, eventually holding 1.5 billion people, a fifth of the world’s population, in the Eastern Bloc.

　　But it happened. Communism’s survival owed something to the diabolical genius of leaders like Stalin and Mao, and something to the civil unrest, despair, and social weakness that they exploited so effectively. At times, they were positively entrepreneurial. Stalin had many global admirers after World War II, but when Western sympathies cooled, especially in the wake of the Soviets’ brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, communists looked further afield. New talent was found in Cuba, Tanzania, and Chile. By pushing Chiang Kai-shek into direct conflict with the Japanese, Stalin helped pave the way for Mao to take charge of war-torn China. Chinese communism in its turn precipitated the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and spilled over into the astonishing crimes of the Khmer Rouge (communist fundamentalists who murdered roughly a quarter of Cambodia’s entire population).Say what you will about Pol Pot, but he was clearly willing to think outside the box.

　　A twisted logic seems to thread its way through McMeekin’s narrative: communist setbacks cause havoc, which in turn opens opportunities for new leaders with fresh, horrible strategies for keeping millions under tight control. Lenin’s “revolutionary defeatism” did not die with him. It is written into communism’s political DNA, giving it a zombie-like ability to keep pulling itself out of the grave. Midway through the book, it occurred to me to wonder as well whether communists don’t perversely benefit from the fact that under their regimes, maladroit politicians tend to be murdered by rivals before they get a chance to take the reins. The ones who make it have a certain ruthless cunning that democratic leaders often struggle to counter.

　　Not every day in the life of a communist society can be quite as terrible as November 4, 1956, in Budapest, or April 17, 1975, in Phnom Penh. There would be no one left alive. Even so, we should probably have been more skeptical of a narrative that presented communism as a force in gradual but definite decline. It seemed ascendant multiple times throughout the twentieth century. At all stages, it found Western sympathizers. It was often extremely successful at reaching specific identified goals: besting Hitler, building bombs, winning gold medals. Five-year plans are terrible, but sometimes they succeed by at least some metrics, because certain goals are more easily reached if one is utterly indifferent to the human cost.

　　Though Americans in general are far more worried about identity politics than geopolitics, a growing number of experts have warned: if the United States gets dragged into a war with China, it’s not clear we would win.

　　As McMeekin tells the story, communism is a kind of political predator, which seeks out weaknesses and takes advantage of them to assert itself more fully. Unfortunately, in a fallen world, there will always be suffering and weakness for predators to exploit.

　　The USSR did eventually fall, though, in an odd sense, the poison pill was dysfunction coupled with relative peace and prosperity. The Soviets overextended themselves, especially in Afghanistan. An older generation of leaders gave way to a new one that lacked the cold-blooded ruthlessness of communist predecessors. McMeekin does point out that Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was initially meant, not as a gateway to liberalization, but more as a targeted strategy meant to facilitate his military ambitions. Even so, it’s clear that Gorbachev lacked the iron-spined depravity of a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Mao. Soviet weaknesses proliferated even as advances in technology and communications made ordinary people more aware of how much better life could be. The Berlin Wall crumbled, and so did the original communist empire.

　　The Second Rise

　　The final ten pages of To Overthrow the World are the least interesting. Looking specifically at repressive Covid-era policies in the West, McMeekin suggests that the Chinese are promoting communism in a new way, using their virtual influence to spread a softer kind of totalitarianism. This feels like a stretch. Covid was an aberration, and the parallels drawn in these final pages run contrary to the entire rest of the book, which vividly illustrates the enormous gulf between deficiencies of Western governance and the horrifying crimes of communism. Did state officials abuse their power in their effort to tamp down online debates about the origins of Covid? They did. Do these abuses belong in the same conversation with the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution? They do not. Even if the theory holds some measure of truth, it’s an odd, underdeveloped ending to an otherwise cohesive book.

　　This final non-sequitur is particularly curious because it’s not in any way needed to justify McMeekin’s arresting subtitle. Communism is rising again, in a far more “conventional” way. The Chinese were primarily responsible for the Covid epidemic, and they have committed serious human rights abuses at home while supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thats all par for the communist course. But far from becoming a global pariah, the Chinese are building a deeper network of alliances, eyeing Taiwan, and flexing their muscles in Eastern Europe, the Pacific, and Latin America. Though Americans in general are far more worried about identity politics than geopolitics, a growing number of experts have warned: if the United States gets dragged into a war with China (which is possible), it’s not clear we would win.

　　It appears that the Eastern Bloc is back, and McMeekin’s book offers helpful historical context for making sense of that larger problem. Readers might come away more fearful, because the book reminds readers how resourceful and strategically brilliant communist leaders can be. At the same time, there are also grounds for confidence and hope. The Chinese, like the Soviets before them, have shocked the world with some of their targeted achievements: stunning manufacturing growth, incredible navy, and major advances in tech. Like the Soviets, they are obsessed with Olympic medals. But political repression carries heavy costs, as does invasive state control of the economy. Free societies generally do have the edge, so long as they can overcome one of their characteristic weaknesses: a penchant for crippling self-doubt, which in turn may inspire naive admiration for ruthless tyrants.

　　We see that in America now, and it divides us and weakens our resolve. Anyone tempted to admire Putin, Xi, or (must we really say this?) Adolf Hitler, should read To Overthrow the World, and remember why freedom is better. No one appreciates this as keenly as the unfortunate people who experienced the alternative.