Definition
Communism is a political and economic ideology that envisions a classless, stateless society in which the means of production are owned in common rather than privately. Drawing on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it holds that history advances through class struggle and that capitalism will eventually be overthrown by the workers it exploits, clearing the way for the abolition of private property.
In the twentieth century, the word took on a second meaning. It also came to describe the actual states that adopted communism as their official creed — beginning with the Soviet Union after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and later including China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and the Eastern European satellites of the USSR. These states diverged sharply from the stateless ideal Marx had imagined. They were governed by a single ruling party, planned their economies from the centre, and used secret police and mass propaganda to suppress dissent. The gap between communism as theory and communism as practice is the central puzzle of the concept.
Why it matters
How it works
From Marx to a state with no recipe
Marx, who died in 1883, spent his career analysing the conditions that produce revolution but wrote very little about how to actually run a country after the revolution had won. He gave the movement a theory of history — class struggle as the engine of change, capitalism as a stage to be transcended — but no blueprint for governance. When Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in October 1917, they inherited a theoretical framework with a practical hole in the middle.
The Bolsheviks therefore had to invent communist statecraft on the fly. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, declared in 1922, was the first attempt in history to organise a major industrial economy around state ownership and central planning. There were no precedents to copy, no neighbouring communist allies to learn from, and an active civil war against anti-Bolshevik "White" armies backed by Britain, France, and the United States. What emerged was less the realisation of Marx's vision than an improvised regime shaped by emergency, in which the secret police (the Cheka), the suspension of civil liberties, and the Red Terror of 1918-1922 were defended as temporary necessities that turned out to be permanent.
The Bolshevik moment: two revolutions, then one party
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not one event but two, eight months apart. In February, a popular uprising over bread shortages, war exhaustion, and the incompetence of Tsar Nicholas II forced the Romanov dynasty to abdicate after three centuries on the throne. A weak Provisional Government tried to keep the country in the war against Germany. In October, Lenin's Bolsheviks — a disciplined minority faction inside the broader Marxist movement — staged a near-bloodless coup, seized the organs of government in Petrograd, and declared the start of a workers' and peasants' state. The first revolution was popular and spontaneous; the second was planned and ideological. Communism in power began as a takeover by an organised minority that claimed to speak for the working class, and it never fully relinquished that claim or that method.
Stalinism and the totalitarian turn
After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin out-manoeuvred rivals such as Trotsky and consolidated personal power. He scrapped Lenin's tolerant New Economic Policy and replaced it with the Five-Year Plans — a forced-march industrialisation that pushed the USSR from a peasant economy to a heavy-industrial one in a single generation, quadrupling machinery output and maximising military production. The cost was paid in the countryside, where collectivisation seized farmland into state hands and triggered a famine in which roughly five million people died. The Great Purge of the late 1930s eliminated another one to two million officers, intellectuals, and party cadres in show trials, executions, and the labour camps of the Gulag. By the time Stalin was finished, communism in Soviet practice meant one party, one leader, a personality cult, state ownership of essentially everything, and the disappearance of dissent.
One machinery, many slogans: the totalitarian family resemblance
The most useful comparative lesson from the interwar period is that communism and fascism, though sworn ideological enemies, shared a structural family resemblance. Stalin's USSR and Mussolini's Italy ran on the same instruments: a single party, a charismatic leader, controlled media, secret police, the dissolution of independent civil society, and the placing of the state above the individual. The slogans pointed in opposite directions — workers of the world unite on one side, the nation reborn on the other — but the machinery was identical. The category of totalitarianism was invented precisely to capture this convergence, and the lesson the comparison teaches is to evaluate regimes by what they do, not what they call themselves. Whether dissent is allowed, whether power is checked, and whether the individual has a sphere apart from the state are the questions that cut beneath the ideology.
Planned production: what it could and could not do
A planned economy controlled from the centre is good at concentrating resources on a small number of clear targets. The Soviet model produced steel, tanks, hydroelectric dams, atomic weapons, the first satellite, and the first man in space. It was much worse at coordinating the millions of small decisions a consumer economy actually consists of. Soviet planners could specify how many tractors to make; they could not specify whether anyone wanted the shoes their factories produced or whether the right spare parts would reach the right repair shop in time. By the 1970s the system was visibly underperforming Western Europe in consumer goods, food quality, housing, technology adoption, and almost every measure of everyday life. The same machinery that achieved heroic outputs in war and heavy industry could not deliver what an ordinary citizen actually wanted on a Tuesday morning.
Reform from above and the Soviet collapse
The Brezhnev years (1964-1982) cemented the system's stagnation — the zastoy. Brezhnev was no Stalin: less murderous, more bureaucratic, and willing to tolerate quiet decay so long as no one openly questioned the regime. By the early 1980s the USSR was running massive trade deficits, losing the technology race, bleeding money in Afghanistan, and watching its own elite quietly conclude that the system did not work. When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985, he genuinely believed Soviet communism could be reformed into something efficient and humane. His two famous slogans ran in opposite directions. Glasnost ("openness") let citizens, journalists, and historians publicly discuss Stalin's crimes, the Afghan war, and the actual state of the economy — and it worked too well, because once Soviet citizens were allowed to speak honestly about the regime, they discovered they had a great deal to say. Perestroika ("restructuring") was supposed to introduce market mechanisms; it produced shortages and inflation instead. Citizens got political freedom and economic hardship at the same time, which is rarely a survivable combination.
1989-1991: the empire that walked away
Gorbachev's decisive break with his predecessors was a single refusal: he would not send tanks. When Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania toppled their communist governments through the autumn of 1989, the Red Army stayed in its barracks. The Berlin Wall, which had divided the city since 1961, opened on the night of November 9 after a confused press conference; the whole outer Soviet empire dissolved peacefully in a single season. In August 1991, hardliners in the Soviet military and KGB tried to seize back control in a coup against Gorbachev, but Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian republic, climbed onto a tank outside the parliament and rallied resistance, and the coup collapsed within three days. By December 1991 the constituent republics had declared independence and the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time. The USSR was not defeated militarily; it disassembled itself when it lost faith in its own legitimacy.