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,