Chapter 22: The Rise and Fall of World Communism

The focus of the chapter is the different roles that Communism had effect on countries in the past two decades of the 20^th century.

The main focus is on Russia and China. The book chooses to focus on these two countries because Russia is the largest country in size as China is the largest country by population.  Both countries took some of their ideas “self-consciously” from the earlier French Revolution. The vision, which was a Marxist ideology, basically wanted to out the higher class. It wanted economic and political equality, and wanted to rid of private property.  Though China and Russia shared many of these ideas and features, they also differed drastically from each other as well.

Russia was the first country to experience a revolution in goal towards communism. In the spans of one year, 1917, Russia’s Czar Nicolas II had lost all support and was forced off his throne, ending the Romanov dynasty that had been in place for more than three centuries.  What caused this upheaval to come about were the pressures that escalated from World War I, creating Russian society to explode. The Provisional Government was then put in place, though it was quickly caught in being inadequate by the social revolution. The government was divided and ineffective and was unable or unwilling to meet the demands of Russia’s people. After this the Bolsheviks, which was a radical group led by Lenin took over the Provisional Government and took charge of Russia, making it into a communist country. However, even then there were still issues which led into a three year civil war. Shortly after the civil war, with the Bolsheviks still on top, Russia was re-named into the Soviet Union. It remained like this for the next twenty five years until another major occurred in Eastern Europe after WWII. Stalin was in charge and had determined that the Soviet Union needed a friendly government and communism was then imposed onto Eastern Europe.

China, although similar in ways to how the Soviet Union became communist, was different in different factors, and left a stronger impact. China did not become a communist country until 1949, which was about 30 years after the Russian revolution. China’s imperial system and failed and collapsed. Unlike Russia, there had been no previous ideas of communism or of Karl Marx in China. It was not until 1921 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded, and over the twenty eight years following it transformed and gained support over time. The CCP however had to face a stronger opponent, unlike the Bolsheviks with the Provisional Government. The Guomindang, or better yet the Nationalist party, was the CCP’s enemy. The Nationalist party was only focused solely on the cities and not on the more rural areas of China where a majority of the population lay. Though it took a while for the CCP to gain support from the peasants, as they were not quick to rise to revolution as the Russians, the CCP did get their chance when the Japanese attacked China. The CCP, unlike the Nationalist party, attacked head on the two major problems in China- the foreign imperialism and peasant exploitation. Four years after the end of WWII, 1949 was when the CCP won support and became in charge of China.

Here we are seeing the beginnings of how communism comes into a country, and how the ideas come faster to some, but inevitably do travel around. Though it took longer for China to become this communist country, the ideas had stuck hard and held deep roots with the peasants, more so than in the Soviet Union where this idea of communism had come faster.