Communism

The traumatic but ultimately victorious march of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists ended on 22 October 1935.

The ‘Milan Kundera affair’, in which the eponymous Czech novelist was recently accused of denouncing a ‘spy’ to the security services in 1950, illustrates how the Communist past has become a battlefield for Czech historians of different generations, writes Aviezer Tucker. 

Archie Brown discusses the contributions of historians to the understanding of Communism and why it failed.

In 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba after a masterly campaign of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on this success, Castro and his followers, including Che Guevara, sought to spread their revolution, as Clive Foss explains.

The ministry of education in the Czech Republic recently issued guidelines on how to teach children about the country’s totalitarian past. Not everyone is pleased, reports Lubomír Sedlák.

Ian D. Thatcher defends the record of Josef Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and sees him as a forerunner of Gorbachev.

Stella Rock sees a renaissance of religious traditions at what was one of Russia’s most vibrant monasteries before the Soviet purge.

The Mongolian past has been drawn by both sides into twentieth-century disputes between Russia and China, writes J.J. Saunders.

International alarm over the terrorist threat is not new. Anthony Read relates how the appearance of Bolshevism created a state of near hysteria throughout the Western world.

As Fidel Castro finally hands over the reins of power after forty-nine years, Michael Simmons finds his country poised between past and future.