In his conclusion to this book, Sean McMeekin predicts that far from being dead, communism is on the verge of a comeback. His evidence is that the “social distancing lockdown” imposed during the Covid pandemic was “a logical outgrowth of the statist population controls embraced by 20th-century communist regimes”.
He further asserts that what he believes were “wildly exaggerated” death projections “helped scare westerners into surrendering their freedoms” and led to the “western adoption of (Chinese) CCP repression”. Noting how bank accounts set up to support Canadian truckers protesting the lockdown were frozen, McMeekin suggests that “it is not hard to imagine ‘debanking’ or other types of persecution being applied in the near future to people whose views dissent from the approved consensus of western social and governing elites on a wider range of topics, such as “climate change”, immigration, race, sexual orientation, or gender identification.”
But while this conclusion fits neatly with a particular right-wing conspiracist world view, his book itself is rather more conventional. Indeed at times, it reads like the work of an enthusiastic 1950s American postgraduate eager to impress their McCarthyite academic supervisor (though discussion of those anti-communist witch hunts is notably absent). Nevertheless, it is a very readable narrative that moves at a rapid pace.
McMeekin takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the prehistory of communist ideas, the French Revolution, the ideas of Marx and Engels, the first and second Internationals, anarchism, Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, war communism, the new economic policy, the rise of Stalin, five-year plans and purges, the second World War, communism’s expansion across eastern Europe, Tito’s break from Moscow, Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet split, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Afghanistan, cheating at the Olympics, Solidarity in Poland, Gorbachev and Glasnost, Tiananmen Square and the upheavals of 1989.
The pace and range comes at price. There is plenty of repetition; we are told three times in almost as many pages that the Bolshevik Maxim Litinov was Jewish. The chatty style wears thin on occasion; Gracchus Baubef led a “souped-up Jacobin faction”, while Marx was a “news junkie” who first began “banging on about proletarian revolution” in 1843.
McMeekin’s central assertion is that “more than any other system of government known to man, communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control”. So this is a book largely concerned with dictators and despots. And that is certainly part of the story of communism. But there is little sense of its appeal to millions of ordinary men and women.
What of those communists who risked lynching to organise African American sharecroppers? Or the Belfast activists who brought the Falls and the Shankill together in unemployment protests during October 1932? The communists who organised the February 1941 Amsterdam general strike against the Nazi deportation of Dutch Jews? There was heroism and self-sacrifice in communism’s history as well as betrayal and careerism. And communism’s promise was not simply an end to inequality, but a society run by the working class themselves. That is why in August 1921 those who took over their workplace in Bruree, Co Limerick, called it a “soviet” and announced that they made “bread, not profits”. It was one of 200 such experiments in Ireland alone in those years.
McMeekin sees the progress of Bolshevism as solely dependent on military force, rather than the “spirit of revolution” which British prime minister Lloyd George warned was haunting Europe in 1919. Indeed this book often gives the impression that communism was enabled by the naivety and ineptitude of the West. The occasional CIA-engineered coup notwithstanding, the general impression is that opposition to communism was half-hearted.
So the scale of White terror deployed against the Bolshevik revolution is understated; in Finland alone, more than 10,000 “reds” were executed after the conclusion of that country’s civil war. The intervention of more than a dozen Allied armies in Russia is similarly minimised. McMeekin contends that Ukrainian Jews were particularly hard hit by Bolshevik economic policies but doesn’t discuss how the majority of the brutal pogroms that took place in Ukraine were carried out by anti-Communist forces. (To be fair he does mention this aspect of the counter-revolution in Hungary).
While the numbers of victims of communist terror are faithfully recorded, the scale of anti-communist violence is generally elided. There is no recognition that many in the capitalist establishment favoured fascism as a legitimate response to the threat of communism before the second World War. Or that after the war the West was prepared both to support authoritarian regimes or overthrow democratic ones to contain it. There is little discussion of death squads and disappearances in El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, East Timor or elsewhere. The anti-communist clampdown in Indonesia is mentioned but not the scale of atrocities there; at least 500,000 were killed. Pinochet’s coup too, is somewhat minimised.
McMeekin’s biggest complaint is that these occasions were bad PR for the West; “even when their clients lost, the Soviets won in the arena of public opinion”. Though he rightfully mentions anti-Semitic aspects of Stalin’s persecutions, he does not discuss the pervasive belief on the right in the interwar period that communism itself was a Jewish plot. When British intelligence chief Basil Thomson asserted in 1919 that “Bolshevism is an international movement controlled by Jews”, he was echoing a view endorsed by Winston Churchill among others. As Paul Hanebrink illustrated in A Specter Haunting Europe (2018) this myth played a key role in mobilising local support for Nazi genocide across eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is strange that a history of international communism does not at least touch on this.
McMeekin explains Franco’s coup in Spain as provoked by a “growing wave of wildcat strikes, property seizures, attacks on churches and monasteries, and general anarchy”. This is indeed how the Spanish right justified it, but few historians would accept this as Franco’s primary motivation. He also contends the republican government in Madrid were mere “puppets” of Moscow, another assertion at odds with the evidence.
The massacres carried out by Franco’s forces, dealt with in detail by Paul Preston in The Spanish Holocaust (2013), are ignored. But McMeekin does (rather glumly) concede the huge cost of the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Hitler after 1941 and acknowledges that for many in eastern Europe, the arrival of the Red Army meant “liberation”. He balances this with emphasis on the American military aid that helped the Red Army’s progress and details of the brutality of that army as it advanced westwards.
But aside from his nod to contemporary far-right fantasy in the conclusion, McMeekin’s book is a fairly standard anti-communist history. It is certainly not a discussion of social or political movements. Hence British communism is reduced to the Cambridge spies rather than the miners in Fife or textile workers in Stepney who elected communist MPs in 1945. For McMeekin, communism is inevitably about force deployed in the service of statist dictatorship. He does not grapple with the question of alternative outcomes.
But surely, as the writer Mark Hayes has argued, (paraphrasing Primo Levi) it is possible to conceive of a communism without concentration camps? (In contrast, the idea of fascism without them is inconceivable.) But ... McMeekin is not lying about the show trials, the gulags, mass disappearances, persecution of ethnic minorities, personality cults and the vast human cost of Stalinism and Maoism.
There remains a contradiction, as relevant now as in the 1930s, as to how people can struggle, sometimes bravely, against oppression in one sphere, yet justify it in another. There are still some who seek to rationalise the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact or downplay the purges. Some communists laud Putin (despite his hostility to the Bolsheviks) because his opposition to Nato makes him “progressive”. Others excuse China’s hyper-capitalist authoritarianism as a necessary stage on the road to socialism.
For some on the left, the position of the actual working class in those societies takes second place to geopolitical cosplaying. In the 1930s that was tragic; today it is farcical. But with the world literally burning and the democratic West prepared to facilitate a genocide in full view, the failures of communism will seem distant to many, particularly those in the global south. McMeekin’s one-sided critique is unlikely to convince anyone who does not already agree with him.
- Dr Brian Hanley is a Teaching Fellow in Twentieth-Century Irish History at Trinity College Dublin. His latest book is The impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland, 1968-79: boiling volcano? (Manchester University Press, 2018)
Further Reading
Out of the Ghetto by Joe Jacobs (Phoenix Press, 1991)
The autobiography of a Jewish East Ender and his experiences of poverty, communism and anti-fascism. Set against the background of the general strike and great depression, Jacobs vividly, but without sentimentality, recreates a lost world.
Navigating the Zeitgeist by Helena Sheehan (Monthly Review Press, 2019)
From an Irish-American family in working-class Philadelphia, Sheehan recalls a journey from the New Left to Official Sinn Féin and the Communist Party. She explains the attraction of global communism even amid its contradictions.
Beating the Fascists? by Eve Rosenhaft (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
In the last years of the Weimar Republic, the German unemployed were much more likely to support the Communist Party than the Nazis. Rosenhaft examines the subculture of working-class Berlin, where social as well as political divisions among the working class fatally undermined the fight against Hitler but where the Nazis trod warily, even after coming to power.
