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Communism

by Nicholas White

Exchange History Writer

     Communism was, for a time, one of the most feared ideals throughout the world.  And with good reason, at times up to a third of the entire world’s population was under its control.  Its heyday was the mid-20^th Century, after World War II, but the seeds were sown nearly a hundred years before. 

     Karl Marx wrote his famous (or infamous) essay, the Communist Manifesto, in 1848, with his friend Freidrich Engels. Marx is seen as the father of communism; Engels is usually forgotten.  This is somewhat ironic, as Engels, the son of a rich businessman, provided Marx much of his funding, and after Marx’s death, completed some unfinished works and championed the cause for another 12 years, until his own death in 1895.

     Marx and Engles’ writings inspired many people, but for some time, all they succeeded in doing was stirring up the radical fringe.  The first successful (using the term loosely) soviet country was Russia.  In 1917, due to the rising unpopularity of the czar of Russia (Nicholas II) because of the long, bloody World War I, the Russian communist party, the Bolsheviks, were able to take control. 

     Amusingly, the infamous agitator Vladimir Lenin was sent home to Russia by the Germans, with the aim that during his takeover of the country, the Russians would be too busy to fight in World War I anymore.  It worked for the Germans, Lenin was elected to lead the new government, and signed a peace treaty, although Russia had to cede some lands to seal the deal.

     In the years following the Russian conversion to communism, several smaller European countries attempted to do the same, places such as Finland, Hungary and Persia (modern day Iran) to name a few.  However, none lasted much more than a year before they were returned to a more traditional form of government.

     The single largest help to the establishment of communism as a worldwide phenomenon was the Second World War and the defeat of Germany.  With small exception, Russia was the eastern front - all nations between them and Germany were either German allies or conquests.  With the collapse of the German power sphere, all the territories captured by the Soviet army were now under Soviet control- including Berlin, Germany, captured on May 2, 1945. 

     The Yalta Conference between the “Big Three” (the leaders of the major allied nations in World War II, America, Britain, and the Soviets) set out a plan to partition the seized territory into nations again.  While this worked well on the western half of Europe, the eastern half occupied by the Red Army, ended up being partitioned into Soviet “satellite states”, under the control of Russia.  The Iron Curtain was rising.

     In 1949, after several years of civil war in China, Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed that China had become a communist state as well.  Unlike the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, China was not under the control of Russia.  However, in a similar fashion as the Russians, Chinese communism began to creep into smaller nations surrounding it, something the United States and its “free” allies were determined to stop.  This set the United States foreign policy for the next several decades, fighting in out of the way places with little territorial value, investing vast resources to attempt to stop the spread of communism to little countries few people had heard of.  Places like Vietnam, and Korea.  Germany was no longer a threat, as it had been for the first half of the century.  Now there were now powers dueling for domination of the world.