The Rise and Fall of Communism

847 Pages·2011·3.57 MB·English

by  Archie Brown

The Rise and Fall of Communism
Archie Brown
To
Susan and Alex,
Douglas and Tamara
and
to my grandchildren
Isobel and Martha,
Nikolas and Alina
Contents

Maps
A Note on Names
Glossary and Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One:
Origins and Development

1. The Idea of Communism
2. Communism and Socialism–the Early Years
3. The Russian Revolutions and Civil War
4. ‘Building Socialism’: Russia and the Soviet Union,
1917–40
5. International Communism between the Two World
Wars
6. What Do We Mean by a Communist System?
Part Two:
Communism Ascendant

7. The Appeals of Communism
8. Communism and the Second World War
9. The Communist Takeovers in Europe–Indigenous
Paths
10. The Communist Takeovers in Europe–Soviet
Impositions
11. The Communists Take Power in China
12. Post-War Stalinism and the Break with Yugoslavia
Part Three:
Surviving without Stalin

13. Khrushchev and the Twentieth Party Congress
14. Zig-zags on the Road to ‘communism’
15. Revisionism and Revolution in Eastern Europe
16. Cuba: A Caribbean Communist State
17. China: From the ‘Hundred Flowers’ to ‘Cultural
Revolution’
18. Communism in Asia and Africa
19. The ‘Prague Spring’
20. ‘The Era of Stagnation’: The Soviet Union under
Brezhnev
Part Four:
Pluralizing Pressures

21. The Challenge from Poland: John Paul II, Lech
Walesa, and the Rise of Solidarity
22. Reform in China: Deng Xiaoping and After
23. The Challenge of the West
Part Five:
Interpreting the Fall of Communism

24. Gorbachev, Perestroika, and the Attempt to Reform
Communism, 1985–87
25. The Dismantling of Soviet Communism, 1988–89
26. The End of Communism in Europe
27. The Breakup of the Soviet State
28. Why Did Communism Last so Long?
29. What Caused the Collapse of Communism?
30. What’s Left of Communism?
Acknowledgements
Notes and Sources
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Archie Brown
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Maps

A Note on Names

There is no completely consistent way of rendering people’s names in a book
such as this. In languages with a different alphabet from that used in English,
there is more than one transliteration system–for example, from Russian and
from Chinese. In the Russian case, I have used a simplified version of the
standard British system, adopted also by a number of North American journals.
That means, for example, Trotsky, rather than Trotskiy (or the Library of
Congress variant, which would be Trotskii). I have also favoured familiarity in
the use of names. Thus, Trotsky’s first name in Russia was Lev, but he is better
known in the outside world as Leon, and that is the form I adopt. I do not use the
Russian soft sign in the text. What in strict transliteration would be Zinov’ev I
render, as is more usual in English, Zinoviev. But when citing books or articles
(and their authors) in Russian in the endnotes, as distinct from the main body of
the book, I do aim to transliterate precisely. When a Russian author has
published a book or article in English, I use the spelling of his or her name
adopted by that author.
In the case of Chinese names, I have generally used the pinyin system,
adopted by most China scholars now–to take the obvious example, Mao Zedong
rather than Mao Tse-tung. But here again I have made concessions to familiarity.
Since Chiang Kai-shek was dead long before the old Wade-Giles system was
abandoned by China specialists, his name appears in that familiar form. For
similar reasons I have used Kuomintang, rather than Guomindang. (The former
and older rendering of the name of the movement established by Sun Yat-sen in
1919 is still used in Taiwan.)
Names which are written in the English alphabet, but with the addition of
diacritical marks, such as, for example, the Slovak Alexander Dubček, or the
Hungarian János Kádár, are used in precisely that way in the book. There are,
however, people who have become better known in the anglicized version of