Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Every socialist state was a revolution before it was a regime, and every one of them changed under the pressures of civil war, invasion, blockade, and scarcity. This lens traces those histories across the Eastern and Asian socialist world, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the Vietnamese and Korean states, the annihilated Indonesian party, the Eastern Bloc and its revolts, and the collapse of 1989 to 1991, from more than one vantage point, so the room can ask what was chosen, what was forced, and what might have gone otherwise. It picks up from the movement history in Origins at the moment revolution becomes government, and it builds on the national-liberation histories in Imperialism and the Global System.

Anchor questions

• How did a revolution meant to free workers end with a secret police? Was that inevitable?
• What did the USSR and China actually achieve, and at what cost?
• Why did the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapse, and who gained from how it ended?
• The largest Communist party outside the ruling states was destroyed in Indonesia in 1965. Why is that history so little known?
• Whose account of these histories do we inherit, and who wrote it?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable loan. The sources here are chosen to disagree with each other; the viewpoint of each is noted.

The Russian Revolution and the USSR

• John Reed (1887 to 1920), Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Eyewitness reporting on October by a communist who was there. The founding pro-Bolshevik narrative. Free: marxists.org
• Sheila Fitzpatrick (b. 1941), The Russian Revolution (1982). The best single overview, from a leading revisionist social historian. Neither apologist nor cold-warrior. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Isaac Deutscher (1907 to 1967), selected writings. Sympathetic to the revolution, critical of its bureaucratic degeneration. Free: marxists.org
• Moshe Lewin (1921 to 2010), The Soviet Century (2005). The system as bureaucratic absolutism, strong on the gulf between state and society. Not free; publisher page.

The Chinese Revolution

• William Hinton (1919 to 2004), Fanshen (1966). Land reform in one village, the revolution from below. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Mobo Gao (b. 1952), The Battle for China’s Past (2008). A defense of the Mao era’s gains against the standard catastrophe narrative. Read against the Great Leap documentary below, and against Dikotter and Yang. No borrowable copy exists and no free companion honestly carries the argument. Paywalled: plutobooks.com, and see the note on access for how to get it.
• Frank Dikotter (b. 1961), Mao’s Great Famine (2010). The hostile archival history: party records marshalled for a death toll of at least 45 million and for a famine made by policy rather than weather. Dikotter is the sharpest academic critic of Maoism and is genuinely disputed on his methods and his arithmetic, which is why he belongs here rather than instead of Gao. Paywalled: frankdikotter.com. His free 39-minute talk, about 75,000 views, puts the case in the room: youtube.com
• Yang Jisheng (b. 1940), Tombstone (2012). The same catastrophe from inside: a Xinhua journalist and party member whose own father starved, who spent twenty years in the provincial archives assembling it. Banned in mainland China. He writes as a communist reckoning with what his party did, which is a different standpoint from Dikotter’s and lands on the room differently. Paywalled: chinafile.com

Vietnam, Korea, and Indonesia

• Ngo Van (1913 to 2005), Revolution and Counter-Revolution Under Colonial Rule (1995). The anti-Stalinist left’s history of the Vietnamese revolution’s suppressed rivals. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Gabriel Kolko (1932 to 2014), Anatomy of a War (1985). A Marxist structural history from the rise of Vietnamese communism to the fall of Saigon. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Bruce Cumings (b. 1943), North Korea: Another Country (2004). The DPRK set against the Korean War and US policy, contextualizing but not credulous. Free to borrow: archive.org
• John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder (2006). The definitive reconstruction of Suharto’s 1965 coup and the pretext for destroying the PKI. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: uwpress.wisc.edu. No honest free companion was found: Roosa’s available talks are about his later book, not this argument.
• Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method (2020). The PKI’s annihilation inside a US-backed global anticommunist program. Every archive.org copy is an unauthorized upload, so there is nothing legitimate to borrow. Paywalled: hachettebookgroup.com. A full interview with Bevins is free, about 370,000 views: youtube.com

Prague 1968

The theme had the Prague Spring only as background inside other people’s accounts. These are the sources.

• Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Action Programme (April 1968). Socialism with a human face in its own words: press freedom, rehabilitation of the purged, a party that persuades rather than commands. Read it knowing the tanks arrived in August, and ask what exactly the Soviets found intolerable in it. Free: marxists.org
• Zdenek Mlynar (1930 to 1997), Nightfrost in Prague (1980). A secretary of the Central Committee who was in the room for the reform and then in Moscow for the negotiations after the invasion, writing once he had been expelled for it. The insider account of a reform crushed by its own alliance. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Alexander Dubcek (1921 to 1992), Hope Dies Last (1993). His own account of the reform, the invasion, and the twenty years of internal exile that followed, written by a communist who never stopped being one. Free to borrow: archive.org

The Eastern Bloc and the fall

• Chris Harman (1942 to 2009), Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, 1945 to 1983 (1988). The workers’ revolts, 1953, 1956, 1968, Poland, as risings against the system that ruled in their name. Trotskyist. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Colin Barker (1939 to 2019), Festival of the Oppressed (1986). Solidarity as a ten-million-strong workers’ movement between reform and revolution. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Chris Harman, The Storm Breaks (1990). A left analysis of 1989 written as it happened. Free: marxists.org

Video

• “Russian Revolution and Civil War: Crash Course #35” (2020). Roughly 16 minutes, about 1.9 million views. A standard-liberal baseline. youtube.com/watch?v=U6KR4cLLVzQ
• “Mao’s Great Leap Forward” (The Cold War, 2021). Roughly 14 minutes, about 298,000 views. Critical in tone; set against Mobo Gao. youtube.com/watch?v=CUqDwoYYOSc
• “Before the Prague Spring” (The Cold War, 2023). Roughly 19 minutes, about 83,000 views. Mainstream background to 1968. youtube.com/watch?v=3BsKa67TGM0

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Frank Dikotter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 (2016). The third volume of Dikotter’s people’s trilogy, on the Cultural Revolution from the archives. Same standpoint and same disputes as the volume above. Not free: frankdikotter.com

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on Mongolia, the Central Asian republics, and Laos, which remain nearly unfillable from free sources: at present Central Asia enters this theme only through Aslund, meaning the region is argued solely by its most triumphalist witness, which is not balance. Vietnam after 1975 is now covered in the experiential lens.