In the preface to his 1991 book, Communism, historian Richard Pipes wrote that “[t]his book is an introduction to Communism and, at the same time, its obituary.” Many scholars since then have attempted similar postmortems, ranging in tone from tragic to triumphalist. But in To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, Sean McMeekin interrupts this funereal historiography with a fundamentally different argument. “Far from dead,” he writes, “Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.” 

McMeekin is the Francis Flournoy Professor of History at Bard College and the author of eight previous books, including revisionist interpretations The Russian Revolution: A New History (2017) and Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (2021). In the lengthy introduction and prologue that opens To Overthrow the World, McMeekin traces Communism’s intellectual roots. Like others before him, he begins with the Greeks. Plato, via Socrates, appeared to argue that the concept of ownership was an obstacle to the ideal society. This kind of reasoning gained moral and political force from the rise of Christianity, with its “eschatological and egalitarian impulses.” Christian anticipation of Christ’s Second Coming inspired a linear view of history, while Christ’s claim that wealth impedes salvation did much to reverse the normal hierarchy of property. As McMeekin notes, however, the Western Church stopped “short of advocating for outright equality of wealth and material differences as proposed by Plato.”  

Ultimately, these two strands of Christian and Platonic thought were joined by a third. Columbus’s arrival in the Americas brought reports of “guileless” and virtuous people there, inaugurating a new wave of literature based on supposed evidence of a perfect prehistory in which property was unheard of and modern vices absent. In the half-century that followed, Thomas More put forward his vision of Utopia and radical Anabaptists attempted to construct their own perfect society in Münster—it ended up resembling hell more than heaven. 

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These three elements—platonic egalitarianism, Christian eschatology, and the myth of a utopian prehistory—were woven together in the Enlightenment by French thinkers. McMeekin notes in particular the work of three Encyclopedists: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, and Gracchus Babeuf. Crucially, they all rejected Christianity’s account of man’s fallen (and unchangeable) state in favor of the view that human nature is malleable and can thus be optimized. They theorized that the right laws, government, and instruction (or coercion) could free human beings from what they viewed as the original sin: greed. But even in the heat of the French Revolution, few except the bloodthirsty Babeuf were willing to attempt a propertyless paradise.  

Having laid this extensive groundwork, McMeekin begins his book formally with Karl Marx. He portrays Marx as exemplifying a new social type, the “déclassé bourgeois intellectual,” who emerged from the growing wealth of the first industrial revolution to sponge off his parents while living the life of a perpetual student. Lazy, argumentative, and hypocritical, Marx nevertheless possessed a real gift for writing, particularly within the rather peculiar framework of his beloved Hegelian dialectics. Unlike G.W.F. Hegel, however, he proved able to appeal to broad audiences, most notably in the Communist Manifesto he co-authored with Friedrich Engels in 1848. 

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Richard Pipes argued that Marx’s great intellectual achievement was to give socialist utopianism the imprimatur of the then-ascendant natural sciences, showing “why the kingdom of equality was not only desirable and feasible but inevitable.” Implicit in this argument was Marx’s assumption that human life could be reduced to quantifiable formulas and thus reliably predicted. But not much of this reasoning was vindicated by the actual course of human events, as McMeekin shows. Even within his lifetime, Marx’s foundational claim—that the concentration of capital must simultaneously immiserate the working class—had been disproven by events in Britain, the leading industrial power. History, by nature complex and unruly, never conforms to determinist laws like those of physics. So Marx’s “historical science” was really a new secular theology, cloaked in the language of scientific certainty. 

All the same, in the three decades after the Communist Manifesto appeared, the ranks of the socialists grew rapidly. At first Marx’s ideas appealed mostly to intellectuals on the margins of power who aspired to become high priests of a new social order. But industrialization produced glaring wealth disparities that gave Communism mass appeal. A new class of precariously employed workers—whom Marx had identified with Rome’s lowest citizens, the proletarii—swelled the ranks of the International Workingmen’s Association, or the First International. 

Marx, living in comfortable (and very bourgeois) exile in England, dissolved the First International because he feared losing control of the organization as it grew. It was reconstituted only after his death as the Second International, formed in 1899. This second iteration comprised a broad array of socialist organizations, dominated by large French and German parties. Despite their apparent unity, they were fundamentally divided on the question of reform versus revolution. The outbreak of World War I exacerbated this division. When it began, nearly all the Second International’s members backed the war effort in their home countries. This made a mockery of their pacifistic prewar pledges and flew in the face of Marx’s claim that “the working men have no country.” Only in Russia did a major socialist party, the Bolsheviks, oppose the war—leading to the mass arrest of its party members.  

Vladimir Lenin, the architect of that policy, faced no such risk. He was safely ensconced in exile abroad with his wife and mistress. Lenin was the ultimate misanthrope—once, in his youth, he cheered on a devastating regional famine as a powerful engine of social change. He similarly saw the war as a catalyst for revolution, since only chaos and suffering could produce the violent discontent necessary for his Bolsheviks to make an attempt at power.  

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McMeekin argues that communism everywhere has taken control in the same way: by force, and almost always with outside military assistance. In Lenin’s case, writes McMeekin, the Bolsheviks received extensive political, financial, and military aid from Germany. At no point on their road to power did they enjoy the support of a majority. In Russia’s one free election, held in late 1917, the Bolsheviks were crushingly defeated. Lenin’s solution, of course, was simply to annihilate the real representatives of the people when they reached Communist-controlled Petrograd in January 1918. It was this action, coupled with Lenin’s surrender to Germany in March 1918, that helped spark the Russian Civil War. 

For the Communists, civil war was not a setback but a welcome opportunity to force through dramatic transformations to the social order. Still, as McMeekin argues, Lenin’s attempts to abolish private property rapidly during the conflict failed. By 1922, Lenin had to admit privately that “we [Communists] cannot run an economy. This has been proved in the past year.” The Communists instead retreated to the New Economic Policy, which reluctantly acknowledged the importance of the vast black market created accidentally by Communist mismanagement. 

The actual task of governing also revealed a fundamental contradiction in Marxist thought. Radical social change required violence, which in turn required a militarized bureaucracy. Those bureaucrats would soon number over 4 million—more than the country’s entire industrial labor force—morphing into a more oppressive aristocracy than any that went before. Its existence was essential to Communism’s survival, yet it simultaneously represented an insurmountable obstacle to a classless proletarian society. 

Faced with these challenges, Soviet leaders drew some solace from Marx. They reassured themselves that homo sovieticus—the new Soviet man, free of greed and selfishness—would take some time to emerge. Marx had written that the revolutionary generation “must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to cope with a new world.” Like Moses, the Bolshevik vanguard could not live to see the promised land they would help create: they were tainted by the sins of pre-Communist society. Stalin would take this line of thinking (inspired, too, by looming conflict with Nazi Germany) to its logical conclusion during the Great Terror. Beginning in 1937, he ordered nearly 700,000 people—many of them senior party members—executed. Millions more were sent to the Gulag. Stalin installed in their place a younger crop of leaders, born without memory of the previous world.  

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Of course, even that mass bloodletting provided no final solution to the internal contradictions of Communism. Instead, it was World War II that brought new life to the Soviet state, in horrific fashion. After first aiding and abetting Hitler’s expansionism for two years, Stalin bought victory over Nazi Germany with 27 million Soviet lives. That victory nonetheless seemed to legitimize a regime that had been so unpopular at the war’s start that more than a million of its own citizens had volunteered to serve in the German army.  

Although World War II seemed to provide posthumous meaning to the sacrifices of the Stalinist period, it did nothing to alleviate the basic intellectual, economic, and moral poverty of the Soviet regime. After Stalin’s death in 1953, nearly every serious effort at reforming the USSR—whatever the intentions of its architects—tended in the direction of liberalization. Whether it was Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign or Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika, Soviet leaders had to deal with the reality that their own ideology was the cause of Russian discontent. There were still true believers, of course. But by the 1980s, Soviet Communism had become little more than puppet theater, maintained by coercion and a vast bureaucracy mainly interested in its own survival—by that point, the KGB alone had nearly half a million employees. 

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The Soviet Union receives the majority of McMeekin’s attention, since it was the sine qua non of Communism in practice—especially given the inability of Communist parties elsewhere to achieve power without Soviet weapons or intervention. But much of the book’s final third also covers the USSR’s revolutionary offspring in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and especially China. The latter two regimes took Marx particularly seriously, and the measure of their enthusiasm is in their number of victims. 

What united these disparate regimes, besides violence, remains unclear until the book’s conclusion. There, McMeekin finally offers his definition of Communism—a difficult task which its own practitioners found impossible. Lenin gave the world the farcical equation that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,” while Khrushchev, in his son’s words, was “not very clear about it himself.” McMeekin, for his part, argues that Communist regimes are defined largely by common practices: single-party dictatorship, elimination of opposition, state control of the economy, efforts to control all aspects of life, and a regime that “hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail.” 

If we accept this admittedly broad definition, we must conclude that Communism—despite a century of failures costing tens of millions of lives—remains alive and well as a mode of government. This, McMeekin proposes, is a sign of its particular appeal as an efficient vehicle for small, usually elite groups to seize and hold power. Over the last 30 years, engagement with China has made its hybrid Communist-Capitalist regime increasingly attractive to Western elites privately disenchanted with popular sovereignty and democracy. These same political actors share a willingness to use increasingly autocratic measures on a range of policies from COVID to the climate. From China they have also picked up an enthusiasm for domestic surveillance and a growing antipathy to free speech and assembly. 

There may be another explanation, too. Historian François Furet argued that Communism resembled a house. Each generation of the 20th century entered with its own motivations and purposes. But each was ultimately disappointed upon finding nothing worthy. Historical ignorance doubtless has encouraged each generation to relive this experience of disenchantment. So too has liberalism and its discontents: the spread of an apparently materialistic, morally vacuous, and ultimately fragmented social order strikes many as an affront to the human search for meaning. That problem birthed the twin monsters of Fascism and Communism. But in vanquishing them both over the course of the 20th century, liberal civilization left many critics with no other viable dreams or aspirations. If Communism or socialism retains lingering appeal, it is doubtless because much of humanity is still struggling to imagine truly appealing alternatives to the current order.