Communism

Robert Dallek | Fall 2010

Miscalculations and blunders by world leaders precipitated the Korean War 60 years ago.

On its 60th anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides in the fighting nearly 4 million lives lost, missing, and wounded, not to mention the devastation of the peninsula from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. Not a single northern or southern Korean city escaped the ravages wrought by modern warfare. Public buildings and private homes were turned into piles of rubble, while thousands of refugees fled from the scenes of battle.

Oyez, Oyez, Oyez

The Readers | November 1994

On the morning of December 8, 1969, our taxicab stopped at the main entrance of the United States Supreme Court, and my wife and I saw through the back-seat window the long sweeping steps, a portico with massive Corinthian columns, and the words EQUAL J

Groping Toward Democracy

Harrison E. Salisbury | February/March 1992

The Russians claim they want to be more like us, but do they have any idea who we are?

The Russian road to democracy is not going to be easy. In the 45-volume edition of Vladimir Lenin’s collected works, the index shows no entry for Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams, or James Madison.

I Fought for Fidel

Neill Macaulay | November 1991

In the twilight of Castro’s regime, one of the soldiers who put him in power recalls what it was like to be a fidelista up in the hills four decades ago when a whole new, just, democratic world was there for the building.

Like a hurricane spawned in distant waters, the full force of the collapse of world communism has finally reached the island of Cuba and seems poised to sweep away the last vestiges of the Marxist-Leninist structure erected there over the last three decades.

Black and White and Red

Jack El-hai | May/June 1991

In 1932, the Communist International paid to send a cast of American blacks to Moscow to make a movie about American racial injustice. The scheme backfired.

In 1932, while Scarface, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

The Last Real Presidential Debate

Tom Swafford | February/March 1986

It took place in 1948, and it was orchestrated, with difficulty, by the program director of a faltering Portland, Oregon radio station. He persuaded two Republican candidates to argue formally about an actual issue, with no moderator.

In October 1984, President Ronald Reagan and Senator Walter Mondale came together on the same platform in Louisville, Kentucky, and again in Kansas City, Missouri. Correspondents tossed questions at them; each answered.

The U.S. And Castro, 1959–1962

Hugh Thomas | October/November 1978

Was the Cuban leader always a Marxist or did the United States impel him in that direction? A distinguished historian of Cuban affairs examines the critical years when the Castro revolution became a communist dictatorship.

A Rough Sunday At Peekskill

Roger M. Williams | April 1976

Paul Robeson was giving a concert. It ended in a riot that foreshadowed the McCarthy era of the 1950’s

In most ways and in most places, Labor Day weekend in 1949 was the quiet, lazy end-of-summer occasion that Americans long have cherished.

Earl Browder: Marx’s Disenchanted Salesman

Harry Stein | December 1971

As general secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S., Browder was routinely attacked by politicians and thought to be a genuine threat to the nation.

For fifteen years, from 1930 to 1945, the name Earl Russell Browder was synonymous in the public mind with American radicalism.

The Great Red Scare

Allan L. Damon | Februrary 1968

In 1919 the U.S. Attorney General swooped down on a alleged Bolshevik revolutionaries and deported them by the boatload. For a while he was a national hero; he dreamed of the White House. But then…

Subscribe to Communism

Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.