An interview with historian Sean McMeekin.
An interview with historian Sean McMeekin
T o Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism is the latest in what is now a series of provocative, blockbuster histories from Sean McMeekin, who is currently Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College. (Full disclosure: I attended Bard College for a few years, long before McMeekin arrived.) The book tracks the origins and impulses behind communist ideals and outlines its theoretical birth by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and its subsequent political life — from triumph to disaster and back again. It is sweeping — carrying the reader across 19th-century Europe and 20th-century Asia — authoritative, fun, and frightening to read.
I asked McMeekin whether we could conduct a print interview to celebrate this release, and he graciously agreed.
Michael Brendan Dougherty: You’ve made a career in history by picking up and filling out the newly available evidence behind theories that other historians may have too quickly abandoned or overlooked. For instance, you highlight the centrality of German foreign policy in your book The Russian Revolution. And in Stalin’s War, you pick up on both the theory of Stalin as the prime mover and beneficiary of the war, as well as the centrality of the Lend-Lease Act in shaping the final world order. Your introduction in To Overthrow The World mentions Richard Pipes’s book on communism, which he conceived of as an “obituary.” What was missing in the histories of communism?
Sean McMeekin: In the first instance, the last 20 or 25 years of history. There were a number of short (and some longer) histories that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which all tended to wrap things up in 1989 or 1991, with just a mere nod to post-Soviet history. Richard Pipes was the most emphatic with this “obituary” line, but these histories all had a certain “goodbye to all that” vibe, even the Black Book of Communism, a kind of catalogue of crime — but written wholly in the past tense. I think things look dramatically different today, owing to the emphatic refusal of communist China to succumb to Western liberalism — rather than becoming more like us, as so many Washington politicians assured us in the 1990s and early 2000s that China would do if we traded with them and “opened” their economy, brought China into the WTO, etc. Instead, it seems that we in the West have become more like communist China, with creeping statism, social controls, and varieties of censorship. This is what I had in mind when I set out to write the book. More specifically, the impetus (or negative inspiration, if you will) came from the Covid lockdowns, which were directly imported from communist China. It seemed worth revisiting the history of communist practice again, particularly in China.
MBD: At the end of your preface you write, “As long as people dream of brotherhood between men, of equal rights for women or for racial or ethnic minorities, or, in the current jargon, of ‘social justice,’ some version of Communism will retain broad popular appeal, enticing young idealists — along with ambitious older politicians who may or may not share in the idealism but are tempted by the promise of an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects — to champion its cause.” Your following introductory chapter makes clear that these have roots in classical philosophy, in the eschatology of Christianity, and are closely connected to democratic ideals of the modern period. Are you saying that, like the poor, the communists will always be with us?
SM: I suppose I am saying that. In the literal sense, communist parties still rule in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Even in Russia, the country that first repudiated single-party communist rule, the Communist Party is second only to Putin’s “United Russia” in size, boasting half a million members and the second-largest delegation in the State Duma.
Still, I’ll concede that the variant of communism practiced in China today may be more powerful and influential than popular, at least outside China. Whereas foreign communists and fellow travelers were inspired by the grandiose “Plans” and blast furnaces of the Stalin era, and to a lesser extent by the manic visions of Maoism, there has been no great upsurge in membership figures for the Communist Party USA in recent years akin to the peaks achieved in 1935–39 and again 1945–47, when the USSR was at its height of international popularity and prestige. Even so the American Communist Party does still exist, claiming about 20,000 paying members (about one-third to one-quarter the size it reached during earlier peaks). That is still nearly 20,000 more than many of us might have expected back in the heady days of 1989 or 1991.
In the broader sense, party labels tell only part of the story. What I am getting at in the book is the surprising endurance, even the flourishing, of certain elements of communist practice in the world, from a social-credit system governing entry into schools, jobs, and acceptable society, to ubiquitous government surveillance, to the ostracization of dissidents. I don’t think there is much risk of any Western country bringing back Gosplan to plan economic activity down to the minutest detail, or trying to “walk on two legs” with some massive state agricultural-industrial buildup akin to those of Stalinism and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. But many of us feel at times that we are living in some strange simulacrum of China’s Cultural Revolution, or that privacy and free expression (online, at least, and in some cases at work or school) have been eroded in a manner that the KGB or Stasi or Securitate, with their cruder, less efficient, and more expensive methods, could only have dreamed of. Here, too, there has been a dramatic and painful vibe shift since Pipes wrote his “obituary,” from the early days of the World Wide Web, when it seemed the internet was an unstoppable freedom train that would enable citizen actors to evade and outwit state censors, to the way in which American tech companies helped communist China better surveille and control its citizens for profit, to the re-export of the evolving “China model” of social controls back to us.
MBD: One thing that jumped out at me was the advantage Marx and Lenin bequeathed to communism over rival socialist ideals and parties by unashamedly incorporating violence into communism’s theory and practice. One reason tweedier British syndicalists or romantic anarchists couldn’t compete with communism is that communism had a role for thugs and criminals. Violence and repression turned out to be the most expedient solution to common political challenges of socialism, such as: How do you get the rich to open their safe-deposit boxes and give their money and possessions to a revolutionary government? Isn’t violence also fitting for the sweeping iconoclasm and anti-traditionalism of communism?
SM: Yes, I think that’s right. There have always been social reformers, socialists, anarchists, and other idealists who talk about reducing inequality, helping the poor, fighting injustice, and so on. Most, however, renounce or at least do not embrace violence. Anarchists and at least some syndicalists have not shied away from violent confrontation, if it happened organically as part of a struggle against an exploitative industrialist, or to win concessions or rights for workers. But it was only the communists — beginning with Marx and then on through Lenin, Stalin, and Mao — who embraced political violence as such, not just as a means but as part of the end, which was, of course, overthrowing the entire “capitalist” world and all of its culture and history, not just reforming this or that company or industry or country. Marx, never tasting real power himself, was nonetheless clear, in his remarks on the sanguinary and short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, that everything from arson to the execution of “class enemy” hostages was a legitimate act of revolutionary war. Lenin, even before attaining power in Russia in 1917, wrote with relish about the coming class and civil wars (and then wars between communist and non-communist states) that he hoped would soon engulf the world. And yes, once in power, he made it clear that, to “expropriate the expropriators,” in Marx’s phrase from Das Kapital, you had to point guns at bankers and the rich and other “class enemies,” and when they resisted, you had to shoot them. Ever since 1917, many non-communist socialists on the left, such as Russian Mensheviks, have lamented the way Lenin hijacked their cause and associated it with mass violence. But it is not at all hard to see why he succeeded and they failed. Unlike them, Lenin was willing to shed blood for the revolution, as much as it took. Marx would have approved.
MBD: When Whittaker Chambers abandoned communism and came over to our precincts in National Review, he thought he was joining the losing side. Conventionally, we tend to view our victory of the Cold War as the inevitable working out of communism’s own contradictions and inborn incompetence. Is that story true? Or could we have lost?
SM: It certainly looked as if we were losing at various points in the Cold War, such as in the mid to late 1970s, in the “malaise” period following the American defeat in Vietnam and Indochina more broadly. If you believed various CIA projections from the 1960s or 1970s, it was easy to think that communism was winning even in economic-growth indices. Of course, we now know that those estimates were based not only on naïveté about Soviet statistical data, but on a wildly flawed official exchange rate of $1.20 to the ruble, rather than a black-market rate closer to $0.10, which threw off GDP estimates by more than a factor of ten: Rather than 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy and closing fast on us, the Soviet economy was more like 5 percent and treading water.
Still, I don’t think economic competition was what Whittaker Chambers was getting at. As a former member of the Communist Party, Chambers was intimately familiar with not only party doctrine but also the fanaticism of party adherents, with their passionate and quasi-millenarian devotion to the cause of revolution. To modify that old Trotsky line about how “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” Chambers understood that most Americans — who were even more distant from communism and its works than Europeans were — were too prosperous and complacent to understand the powerful forces unleashed by the Russian Revolution and global communism, and they therefore were not ready to fight against them in the way Chambers thought we must do. Communists were always ready for battle; their opponents, if they even knew they were opponents, mostly wanted to be left alone. So he felt that he was joining the losing side.
Now, it could be that Chambers, who mostly operated in the era of high Stalinism, overestimated the raw animal spirits of subsequent Soviet party leaders and apparatchiks, none of whom possessed Stalin’s degree of ruthlessness. Likewise, the fanaticism of American or European communists, despite signs of revival at various points in the 1960s and 1970s, tended to dwindle over time. But he did have a point about the lack of animal spirits among political leaders on the non-communist side. How can we explain détente and Ostpolitik, for example, if not as acceptance of the legitimacy of communist regimes, a refusal to confront or contest them seriously? It is not hard to imagine, with a different outcome in the U.S. presidential election of 1980, a more accommodationist approach by a second Carter administration over the Soviet war in Afghanistan, a more passive U.S. military posture, no Strategic Defense Initiative or conventional arms buildup, no aggressive deployment of the Saudi “oil weapon” to crater Soviet energy revenues — basically the absence of that “ratchet” pressure applied by Reagan that forced Gorbachev, after 1985, into a cascading series of concessions that amounted to a kind of self-demolition of the Soviet Communist Party regime. I am not sure whether this means the U.S. would have “lost” the Cold War, exactly, but it certainly would not have ended with so apparently decisive a U.S. victory.
MBD: When I look at China’s Chairman Xi someone whose father was a victim of communist-style historical revisionism, and who himself was victimized by the Cultural Revolution, it reminds me that communism in Russia allowed a period in which Stalin’s crimes could be admitted — to a degree. But the regime carried on. What is there to say about the endurance of communism in the face of its own enormities?
SM: I suppose part of the answer lies in the enormity of those enormities — the repression and suffering under communist regimes were so well-nigh universal that it was rare that any family was untouched by them. Take Gorbachev, for example, who lost two uncles and an aunt to starvation in the collectivization drive of the early 1930s, and who saw both his grandfathers sent to Gulag camps in the Terror years, one of whom, despite having helped build his village’s collective farm, was brutally tortured. I suppose one might conclude that Gorbachev therefore set out to avenge his ancestors by capsizing Soviet communism, but of course this is not at all what happened. Rather, he was a passionate lifelong Communist Party member who tried to save Communism right up to 1991, when he was outmaneuvered by Yeltsin, who was willing to jettison the party. Or one could point to Deng Xiaoping, who was denounced as a “capitalist roader” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and put under house arrest, cast out of good favor in the Chinese Communist Party for nearly eight years before being reinstated in 1974. This personal experience of party repression and ostracization did not prevent Deng from ordering the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square that kept the CCP in power in 1989. In this sense, Xi is unusual neither in his family history nor in his apparent refusal to draw any political conclusions from it about the dangers of one-party rule and dictatorship.
What we are dealing with here, I think, is far more than just a political party. What is remarkable about dialectical materialism, as Marx styled his endlessly adaptable version of Hegelian philosophy, is that setbacks (and even powerful rebukes and punishments by the party) somehow reinforce the faith of adherents rather than undermining it. There is a kind of “antifragility” to communism, as Nassim Taleb might call it — resistance strengthens the faith. If history is an unending struggle between the elect “proletarian” class and its enemies, then every setback makes the next step more urgent. To rationalize his New Economic Policy, Lenin used the metaphor of “two steps forward, one step back.” The step back might be a big one, it might be a personal blow or economic failure or a foreign invasion, but it is the next lunge forward that matters.
MBD: North Korea is derided as a madhouse, but strangely, Juche, the state ideology, still attracts the occasional South Korean intellectual. Communists are the second-largest party in Russia. The way some Russia hawks talk about Putin as a pure continuation of the KGB seems to put into doubt their normal talk about the triumph of 1989–91. China’s model attracts intellectual support and international capital for getting things done, but it also seems to repulse people insofar as it is joined to an ethic and public policies of Han racial supremacy. How would you characterize the global status of communism now?
SM: If we mean the Communist Party or just the word “communism,” I wouldn’t say that either has as much popular appeal as they have sometimes held in the past, for example in the peaks of the Popular Front era (1935–39), the early post-1945 Soviet-expansion years (until the Soviet image took a hit with the Berlin airlift and the onset of ugly show trials in the East European satellites in 1948–49), and at times in the 1960s and 1970s. As you mention, Chinese communism suffers a bit from its lack of “internationalism” in the old Soviet and Marxist sense — there is no Comintern in Beijing coordinating international propaganda and recruitment efforts of party members and “fellow travelers.” And even the “Confucius Institutes” operating on U.S. college campuses until a recent crackdown were devoted, at least on the surface, to spreading Chinese language and culture (or we might say chauvinism) rather than communist doctrine as such. Nonetheless, there is a blurry line between cultural outreach of this kind and the promotion of the interests of the CCP regime, and even less distance between communism and CCP spying and influence operations in Washington, D.C., and many U.S. state capitals, which is hardly different from the kind the Soviets practiced during the Cold War. In terms of expenditure and the penetration of major U.S. institutions, the CCP seems to be more successful today than the Soviets were, with the possible exception of the period of peak Soviet influence in the 1930s and 1940s. True, there are fewer adherents of the American Communist Party now than there were then, and certainly less ambient sympathy for communist ideas in Washington and among the general U.S. public. In some ways, this makes CCP influence operations in the U.S. today even more impressive, as they work against the natural flow of American public opinion, which tends to be fairly hostile to communist China.
As for Putin, I think we have to distinguish between foreign popularity and the residues of Soviet communism inside Russia. In the U.S., despite the Russiagate hysteria of recent years, Russian influence is negligible at best and negative at worst, by which I mean that anyone who speaks up for Putin’s Russia in Washington or the U.S. media is immediately ostracized as a Putin apologist. This was already true before the Ukraine invasion of 2022, although admittedly the tone is now even more hysterical. I think you are right that, among more right-leaning “Russia hawks,” there is talk of Putin as an unreconstructed KGB man whose crackdowns on Russian journalists are reminiscent of Soviet practice, as is, I suppose, his Stalin-esque hostility to Ukraine. There is some truth to this, which at least makes more sense than the more left-coded attacks on Putin as the Christian-nationalist leader of some global reactionary-populist cabal devoted to eradicating LGBTQ+ rights, which make him sound like a hysterical anti-communist. Obviously, these contradictory images of Putin (unreconstructed communist or hysterical anti-communist) cannot both be true.
What I would say is that the real Putin and his regime are much less interesting than these “evil genius” caricatures. Putin is neither a devoted communist nor a principled anti-communist. His view of Soviet history, which he has expressed at great length in print and in interviews, is mixed. He thinks the economic-planning elements were misguided and counterproductive (which is why Russia has abandoned most of them, though not all public subsidies, and of course the state role in the Russian energy sector in particular remains large); he thinks that Lenin weakened Russia (not least by midwifing Ukraine into existence) but that Stalin-as-conqueror strengthened the Soviet Union, and that the repression of the Stalin years was bad but not as bad as Western historians have said. Most of all, and perhaps most relevant for us as Americans, Putin (like most though not all Russians) has reverted, in the past few decades, from an initial openness to the U.S. and the West more broadly to an intense suspicion of American motives and U.S. foreign policy that, in some ways, has come to resemble the most paranoid Soviet tropes from the Cold War.
I caught an intense whiff of this unreconstructed communist paranoia in a history discussion on Russian television about six years ago, in between the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and the 2022 invasion, when I listened politely (before pointedly objecting to) Russian intellectuals blaming the United States for the outbreak of the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the murder of the Romanov family, and the looting of the Russian Imperial gold reserves. (This last one owes in part to my own, wholly misinterpreted work on the subject, namely, the idea that, because this gold looted by the Bolsheviks was melted down in Stockholm and Copenhagen with Tsarist insignia removed, it became legal tender to pay for European weapons imports, and much of the new clean gold bars ended up, after a long line of transactions, in New York.) Now, there is a long skein of recent history — related to everything from NATO expansion to the Kosovo war of 1999 and the Ukraine crisis and now war — that turned Russians against the U.S. and caused them to revert to these ahistorical, communist-esque views of Americans as kind of plutocratic bogeymen. For both personal and professional reasons I dearly wish this had not happened. It has happened, though, and this is where we are now.
MBD: When I was younger man, I remember the night I was told by an Italian acquaintance that the American accounting firm Ernst and Young then occupied the former headquarters of the Italian Communist Party in Rome, and that the statue of Antonio Gramsci still stood there in the lobby, with the officials of global capitalism walking past him each day. Superficially, the image seems to highlight the triumph of the free world over communism. But this image still haunts me today. It reminds me of the way Marx praised capitalism as a solvent corroding traditional forms of life and institutions, namely the family and the Church, which were obstacles to the emergence of new socialist man. In the West, the family and the Church continue to die. Could Marx still be right? Could it be that Russia and China are “deformed workers’ states” and that we await the emergence of true communism in America? Does capitalism pave the way for communism? Certainly one way of reading the first half of the 20th century is that America helped communists even at the expense of traditional monarchies and empires, or do I have that wrong? Are we bound to sell them the rope with which to hang us?
SM: I certainly hope Marx was not right about this! But I think that you are on to something a bit unsettling here. Many Westerners who have visited the ex-communist areas of Eastern Europe have noticed certain ironies. It is not just that conservative movements, causes, and parties are far stronger than in Western Europe, but that social decay seems less advanced, families stronger, fashionable wokeism almost nonexistent. It seems, at first glance, as if the extreme, literal-minded version of communism artificially imposed on these countries by Soviet arms somehow inoculated most people against the softer forms of cultural radicalism that have overtaken the West.
Still, we should not exaggerate the cultural resiliency of the ex-communist East. Despite “natalist” and pro-family policies in countries such as Hungary, the birth rate remains well below the replacement rate in Hungary as everywhere in Eastern Europe, statistically not all that different from in the West. These policies are welcome and may help, but they are only slowing an ongoing demographic decline, rather than heralding a civilizational revival. If one factors in variations in the cost of living and differing policies on migrants and immigration, family formation is of course far more affordable in Eastern Europe, church attendance a bit higher, crime rates generally lower, and in many ways society seems healthier. But it is a matter of degree.
What I think you are really getting at, though, is a boomerang effect, as turbo-America flattens traditions all over the world, from the old European empires and the new states born of them, to the formerly communist world (which initially benefitted from our weakening of the European empires), before ultimately wreaking havoc on whatever traditions Americans themselves still have. To give credit to Marx, he was not wrong that capitalism can destroy old traditions, can weaken the family and broader community ties, even while ushering in prosperity — the price of progress, we might call it. Look at what Amazon has done to bookstores and retail, what Walmart (and now the various Dollar-branded discount emporia) did to family-owned general stores, small businesses, and all the civic institutions and local sports teams that depended on them. Look at what capitalist innovation (along with government regulation and collusion, regulatory capture, etc.) has done to what is now the business of human reproduction, or to the American diet, or to the metastasizing number of often-addictive medications Big Pharma now peddles to Americans. Of course, the original communist “solution” to the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism was to deprive humans of the few freedoms and dignities they still had, and meanwhile impoverish and enslave them. What populists (like social democrats before them, though with different emphases) seem to be offering today is some middle ground, where governments can help alleviate social problems rather than exacerbate them. But it’s tough sledding, as so many social indicators keep getting worse, and social media depress everyone still further by reminding them how far we have fallen (and forcing us to stare at screens, rather than getting out and improving things). What makes this downward spiral so vicious is that nearly every solvent weakening cultural bonds is highly profitable! To modify Lenin, we are selling ourselves the rope that is hanging us.
MBD: Thank you so much for your time, and your books.