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154-537: The Sixtiers were distinguished by their liberal and anti-totalitarian views, and romanticism, which found vivid expressions in music and visual arts. Although most of the Sixtiers believed in Communist ideals, they had come to be strongly disappointed with Stalin's regime and its repression of basic civil liberties. The Sixtiers can be roughly divided into two groups: the "physicists" (those involved in sciences) and

308-643: A semi-colony to a leading world power, with greatly advanced literacy, women's rights, basic healthcare, primary education, and life expectancy. Its leading role in World War II saw the emergence of the industrialized Soviet Union as a superpower . Marxist–Leninist governments modeled on the Soviet Union took power with Soviet assistance in Bulgaria , Czechoslovakia , East Germany , Poland , Hungary, and Romania . A Marxist–Leninist government

462-459: A social revolution . The two classes are the proletariat , who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie , a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property,

616-470: A "human face" to socialism by expressing dissatisfaction with the system of censorship. Many socialists put faith in the potential for reform in the Soviet Union, especially because of the political liberalization which occurred under Dubček in Czechoslovakia. However, the Soviet Union invasion of a liberalizing Czechoslovakia, in the events of " Prague Spring ", crushed hopes for reform and stymied

770-500: A communist party, the rejection of private property and capitalism, state control of economic activity and mass media , restrictions on freedom of religion , and suppression of opposition and dissent. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, several previously Communist governments repudiated or abolished Communist rule altogether. Afterwards, only a small number of nominally Communist governments remained, such as China , Cuba , Laos , North Korea , and Vietnam . With

924-473: A distinct stage between capitalism and communism. This intermediate stage was a concept introduced by Vladimir Lenin as a means to defend the Bolshevik seizure of power against traditional Marxist criticism that Russia's productive forces were not sufficiently developed for socialist revolution . A distinction between communist and socialist as descriptors of political ideologies arose in 1918 after

1078-526: A form of communism. In their words, the Hutterites "established in their communities a rigorous system of Ordnungen, which were codes of rules and regulations that governed all aspects of life and ensured a unified perspective. As an economic system, communism was attractive to many of the peasants who supported social revolution in sixteenth century central Europe." This link was highlighted in one of Karl Marx 's early writings; Marx stated that "[a]s Christ

1232-455: A greater emphasis on certain aspects of classical Marxism while rejecting or modifying other aspects. Many schools of thought have sought to combine Marxian concepts and non-Marxian concepts, which has then led to contradictory conclusions. There is a movement toward the recognition that historical materialism and dialectical materialism remain the fundamental aspects of all Marxist schools of thought . Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots are

1386-556: A hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base. They were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline . The Great Purge of 1936–1938 was Joseph Stalin 's attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . In the Moscow trials , many old Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during

1540-495: A key role in the existence of the samizdat phenomenon. For instance, the USSR's refusal to publish Boris Pasternak's epic novel, Doctor Zhivago led to the novel's subsequent underground publication. Likewise, the circulation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous work about the gulag system, The Gulag Archipelago , promoted a samizdat revival during the mid-1970s. However, because samizdat by definition placed itself in opposition to

1694-540: A matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." In the United States, communism is widely used as a pejorative term as part of a Red Scare , much like socialism , and mainly in reference to authoritarian socialism and Communist states . The emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally Communist state led to

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1848-425: A particular type of communism. One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste ("communist author"). In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property. Restif would go on to use

2002-420: A poet. His poems circulated in samizdat, with only four judged as suitable for official Soviet anthologies. In the mid-1960s an unofficial literary group known as SMOG (a word meaning variously one was able , I did it , etc.; as an acronym the name also bore a range of interpretations) issued an almanac titled The Sphinxes ( Sfinksy ) and collections of prose and poetry. Some of their writings were close to

2156-529: A possible communist or socialist theorist, or as the first author to give communism a serious consideration. The 5th-century Mazdak movement in Persia (modern-day Iran) has been described as communistic for challenging the enormous privileges of the noble classes and the clergy , criticizing the institution of private property , and striving to create an egalitarian society. At one time or another, various small communist communities existed, generally under

2310-531: A post-capitalist society – positive humanism, socialism, Communism, realm of free individuality, free association of producers, etc. He used these terms completely interchangeably. The notion that 'socialism' and 'Communism' are distinct historical stages is alien to his work and only entered the lexicon of Marxism after his death." According to the Encyclopædia Britannica , "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been

2464-617: A prerequisite to socialism , were critical of the Bolsheviks from the beginning due to Russia being seen as too backward for a socialist revolution . Council communism and left communism , inspired by the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the wide proletarian revolutionary wave, arose in response to developments in Russia and are critical of self-declared constitutionally socialist states . Some left-wing parties, such as

2618-428: A revolutionary nature because of its claim that a fundamental shift in political structure was necessary to reform the state, unlike socialists, who hoped to work within the same basic political framework to achieve change. Despite the revolutionary nature of the democratic samizdat authors, most democrats advocated moderate strategies for change. Most democrats believed in an evolutionary approach to achieving democracy in

2772-458: A socialist principle of " to each according to his contribution ". Socialism has been described as a philosophy seeking distributive justice, and communism as a subset of socialism that prefers economic equality as its form of distributive justice. In 19th century Europe, the use of the terms communism and socialism eventually accorded with the cultural attitude of adherents and opponents towards religion . In European Christendom , communism

2926-546: A socialist state that is in the process of constructing communism. Terms used by Communist states include national-democratic , people's democratic , socialist-oriented , and workers and peasants' states. According to Richard Pipes , the idea of a classless , egalitarian society first emerged in ancient Greece . Since the 20th century, ancient Rome has been examined in this context, as well as thinkers such as Aristotle , Cicero , Demosthenes , Plato , and Tacitus . Plato, in particular, has been considered as

3080-545: A variety of materials such as detective novels, adventure stories, and science fiction in addition to dissident texts, resulting in the underground publication of samizdat covering a wide range of topics. Though most samizdat authors directed their works towards the intelligentsia, samizdat included lowbrow genres in addition to scholarly works. Hyung-Min Joo carried out a detailed analysis of an archive of samizdat (Архив Самиздата, Arkhiv Samizdata ) by Radio Liberty , sponsored by

3234-421: A wider audience but also by its physical form. The hand-typed, often blurry and wrinkled pages with numerous typographical errors and nondescript covers helped to separate and elevate Russian samizdat from Western literature. The physical form of samizdat arose from a simple lack of resources and the necessity to be inconspicuous. In time, dissidents in the USSR began to admire these qualities for their own sake,

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3388-710: A work about More, whose ideas could be regarded as "the foregleam of Modern Socialism" according to Kautsky. During the October Revolution in Russia, Vladimir Lenin suggested that a monument be dedicated to More, alongside other important Western thinkers. In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, where a Puritan religious group known as the Diggers advocated the abolition of private ownership of land. In his 1895 Cromwell and Communism , Eduard Bernstein stated that several groups during

3542-521: A year later the full text was judged unsuitable for publication and entered samizdat circulation. Certain works, though published legally by the State-controlled media, were practically impossible to find in bookshops and libraries, and found their way into samizdat: for example Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was widely distributed via samizdat. At

3696-455: Is a sociopolitical , philosophical , and economic ideology within the socialist movement , whose goal is the creation of a communist society , a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production , distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes , and ultimately money and

3850-466: Is a non- idealist attempt at the understanding of material history and society, whereby communism is the expression of a real movement, with parameters that are derived from actual life. According to Marxist theory, class conflict arises in capitalist societies due to contradictions between the material interests of the oppressed and exploited proletariat  – a class of wage laborers employed to produce goods and services – and

4004-480: Is that of educating voters in what are deemed their true interests rather than in response to the expression of interest by voters themselves. When they have gained control of the state, Leninist communists' main task was preventing other political parties from deceiving the proletariat, such as by running their own independent candidates. This vanguardist approach comes from their commitments to democratic centralism in which communists can only be cadres, i.e. members of

4158-542: Is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty." Thomas Müntzer led a large Anabaptist communist movement during the German Peasants' War , which Friedrich Engels analyzed in his 1850 work The Peasant War in Germany . The Marxist communist ethos that aims for unity reflects

4312-407: Is unique to the post-Stalin USSR and other countries with similar systems. Faced with the state's powers of censorship, society turned to underground literature for self-analysis and self-expression. The first full-length book to be distributed as samizdat was Boris Pasternak 's 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago . Although the literary magazine Novy Mir had published ten poems from the book in 1954,

4466-680: Is viewed overwhelmingly negatively as a mass murderer ; for significant numbers of Russians and Georgians, he is regarded as a great statesman and state-builder. After the Chinese Civil War , Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 as the Nationalist government headed by the Kuomintang fled to the island of Taiwan. In 1950–1953, China engaged in a large-scale, undeclared war with

4620-614: The 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election , socialist parties totaled well over 70% of the vote. The Bolsheviks were clear winners in the urban centres, and took around two-thirds of the votes of soldiers on the Western Front, obtaining 23.3% of the vote; the Socialist Revolutionaries finished first on the strength of support from the country's rural peasantry, who were for the most part single issue voters , that issue being land reform, obtaining 37.6%, while

4774-490: The 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union . War communism was the first system adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War as a result of the many challenges. Despite communism in the name, it had nothing to do with communism, with strict discipline for workers, strike actions forbidden, obligatory labor duty, and military-style control, and has been described as simple authoritarian control by

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4928-665: The Cheget , to Russian president Boris Yeltsin . That evening at 7:32, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag . Previously, from August to December 1991, all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had seceded from the union. The week before the union's formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol , formally establishing

5082-735: The Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people. Communist thought has also been traced back to the works of the 16th-century English writer Thomas More . In his 1516 treatise titled Utopia , More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose rulers administered it through the application of reason and virtue . Marxist communist theoretician Karl Kautsky , who popularized Marxist communism in Western Europe more than any other thinker apart from Engels, published Thomas More and His Utopia ,

5236-562: The Chronicle ' s production and distribution. The periodical's typist and first editor Natalya Gorbanevskaya was arrested and put in a psychiatric hospital for taking part in the August 1968 Red Square protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1974, two of the periodical's close associates (Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin ) were persuaded to denounce their fellow editors and the Chronicle on Soviet television. This put an end to

5390-558: The Cold War had begun. Stalin himself believed that capitalism was a hollow shell and would crumble under increased non-military pressure exerted through proxies in countries like Italy. He greatly underestimated the economic strength of the West and instead of triumph saw the West build up alliances that were designed to permanently stop or contain Soviet expansion. In early 1950, Stalin gave

5544-841: The Commonwealth of Independent States , and declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. As of 2023, states controlled by Communist parties under a single-party system include the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba , the Democratic People's Republic of Korea , the Lao People's Democratic Republic , and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam . Communist parties, or their descendant parties, remain politically important in several other countries. With

5698-669: The English Civil War (especially the Diggers) espoused clear communistic, agrarianist ideals and that Oliver Cromwell 's attitude towards these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile. Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century through such thinkers as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably , Jean Meslier , Étienne-Gabriel Morelly , and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. During

5852-524: The Russian Revolution or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, including Lev Kamenev , Grigory Zinoviev , Alexei Rykov , and Nikolai Bukharin , were accused, pleaded guilty of conspiracy against the Soviet Union, and were executed. The devastation of World War II resulted in a massive recovery program involving the rebuilding of industrial plants, housing, and transportation as well as

6006-611: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , which resulted in the adjective Communist being used to refer to socialists who supported the politics and theories of Bolshevism, Leninism , and later in the 1920s those of Marxism–Leninism . In spite of this common usage, Communist parties also continued to describe themselves as socialists dedicated to socialism. According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx , "Marx used many terms to refer to

6160-626: The Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. The 1965 show trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky , charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and the subsequent increased repression, marked the demise of the Thaw and the beginning of harsher times for samizdat authors. The trial was carefully documented in a samizdat collection called The White Book (1966), compiled by Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg. Both writers were among those later arrested and sentenced to prison in what

6314-731: The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies in the October Revolution; after a few weeks of deliberation, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks from November 1917 to July 1918, while the right-wing faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party boycotted the soviets and denounced the October Revolution as an illegal coup . In

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6468-595: The Socialist Party of Great Britain , boasted of having called the Bolsheviks, and by extension those Communist states which either followed or were inspired by the Soviet Bolshevik model of development, establishing state capitalism in late 1917, as would be described during the 20th century by several academics, economists, and other scholars, or a command economy . Before the Soviet path of development became known as socialism , in reference to

6622-511: The Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II . As one of the many types of socialism , communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy , within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. During most of the 20th century, around one-third of the world's population lived under Communist governments. These governments were characterized by one-party rule by

6776-556: The Soviet economic model , several scholars posit that in practice the model functioned as a form of state capitalism . Public memory of 20th-century Communist states has been described as a battleground between anti anti-communism and anti-communism . Many authors have written about mass killings under communist regimes and mortality rates , such as excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin , which remain controversial, polarized, and debated topics in academia, historiography, and politics when discussing communism and

6930-588: The US Congress and launched in the 1960s, and reported that of its 6,607 items, 1% were literary, 17% nationalist, 20% religious, and 62% political, noting that as a rule, literary works were not collected there, so their 1% (only 73 texts) are not representative of their real share of circulation. In its early years, samizdat defined itself as a primarily literary phenomenon that included the distribution of poetry, classic unpublished Russian literature, and famous 20th century foreign literature. Literature played

7084-427: The bourgeoisie  – the ruling class that owns the means of production and extracts its wealth through appropriation of the surplus product produced by the proletariat in the form of profit . This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's productive forces against its relations of production , results in a period of short-term crises as the bourgeoisie struggle to manage

7238-400: The common ownership of the means of production, therefore abolishing the bourgeoisie, ultimately abolishing the proletariat itself and ushering the world into communism as a new mode of production . In between capitalism and communism, there is the dictatorship of the proletariat ; it is the defeat of the bourgeois state but not yet of the capitalist mode of production, and at the same time

7392-652: The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Fall of Communism , there was a split between those hardline Communists, sometimes referred to in the media as neo-Stalinists , who remained committed to orthodox Marxism–Leninism , and those, such as The Left in Germany, who work within the liberal-democratic process for a democratic road to socialism; other ruling Communist parties became closer to democratic socialist and social-democratic parties. Outside Communist states, reformed Communist parties have led or been part of left-leaning government or regional coalitions, including in

7546-548: The materialist conception of history which holds that the key characteristic of economic systems through history has been the mode of production and that the change between modes of production has been triggered by class struggle. According to this analysis, the Industrial Revolution ushered the world into the new capitalist mode of production . Before capitalism, certain working classes had ownership of instruments used in production; however, because machinery

7700-445: The means of production , earning profit via the surplus value generated by the proletariat, who have no ownership of the means of production and therefore no option but to sell its labor to the bourgeoisie. According to the materialist conception of history, it is through the furtherance of its own material interests that the rising bourgeoisie within feudalism captured power and abolished, of all relations of private property, only

7854-401: The productive forces ) is the primary agent of change in the structure of society and of human social relations and that social systems and their relations (e.g. feudalism , capitalism , and so on) become contradictory and inefficient as the productive forces develop, which results in some form of social revolution arising in response to the mounting contradictions. This revolutionary change is

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8008-431: The state (or nation state ). Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian socialist approach of communization , revolutionary spontaneity , and workers' self-management , and a more authoritarian vanguardist or communist party -driven approach through the development of a socialist state , followed by

8162-435: The two-stage theory , communists made no major distinction between the socialist mode of production and communism; it is consistent with, and helped to inform, early concepts of socialism in which the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Monetary relations in the form of exchange-value , profit , interest , and wage labor would not operate and apply to Marxist socialism. While Joseph Stalin stated that

8316-488: The withering away of the state . As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum , communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far-left. Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism , Marxist schools of thought , and religious communism , among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism , Leninism , and libertarian communism, as well as

8470-520: The "Persecution of the Crimean Tatars", "Persecution and Harassment in Ukraine", "Lithuanian Events", and so on. The Chronicle editors maintained that, according to the 1936 Soviet Constitution , then in force, their publication was not illegal. The authorities did not accept the argument. Many people were harassed, arrested, imprisoned, or forced to leave the country for their involvement in

8624-476: The "lyricists" (those involved in arts, such as writers, theatre and film professionals, etc.). Among some of the common attributes and pastimes of the Sixtiers were Bard (singer-songwriter) music, poetry, disillusionment in politics, and love for camping trips to remote regions of the USSR. After the beginning of the Perestroika and Glasnost policies (in the late 1980s – early 1990s), the term "Sixtiers"

8778-615: The 20th century. In Western Europe, communist parties were part of several post-war governments, and even when the Cold War forced many of those countries to remove them from government, such as in Italy, they remained part of the liberal-democratic process. There were also many developments in libertarian Marxism, especially during the 1960s with the New Left . By the 1960s and 1970s, many Western communist parties had criticized many of

8932-696: The Bolsheviks to maintain power and control in the Soviet regions, rather than any coherent political ideology . The Soviet Union was established in 1922. Before the broad ban in 1921, there were several factions in the Communist party, more prominently among them the Left Opposition , the Right Opposition , and the Workers' Opposition , which debated on the path of development to follow. The Left and Workers' oppositions were more critical of

9086-422: The Communist ideal. Mao charged that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of a "revisionist clique" which had turned against Marxism and Leninism and was now setting the stage for the restoration of capitalism. The two nations were at sword's point by 1960. Both began forging alliances with communist supporters around the globe, thereby splitting the worldwide movement into two hostile camps. Rejecting

9240-753: The Constituent Assembly in January 1918. The Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was issued by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union , a committee dominated by Lenin, who had previously supported a multi-party system of free elections. After the Bolshevik defeat, Lenin started referring to the assembly as a "deceptive form of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarianism." Some argued this

9394-534: The Democratic Union formed in May 1988), Levyi povorot ("Left turn", edited by Boris Kagarlitsky ), Otkrytaya zona ("Open zone") of Club Perestroika, Merkurii ("Mercury", edited by Elena Zelinskaya) and Khronograph ("Chronograph", put out by a number of Moscow activists). Not all samizdat trends were liberal or clearly opposed to the Soviet regime and the literary establishment. "The Russian Party ...

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9548-528: The Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" denoted themselves communists . This latter branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany. While liberal democrats looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution , which in

9702-545: The Great Leap was a very expensive disaster." Put in charge of rescuing the economy, Deng adopted pragmatic policies that the idealistic Mao disliked. For a while, Mao was in the shadows but returned to center stage and purged Deng and his allies in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The Cultural Revolution was an upheaval that targeted intellectuals and party leaders from 1966 through 1976. Mao's goal

9856-605: The October Revolution which involved the assault on Petrograd occurred largely without any human casualties . By November 1917, the Russian Provisional Government had been widely discredited by its failure to withdraw from World War I, implement land reform, or convene the Russian Constituent Assembly to draft a constitution, leaving the soviets in de facto control of the country. The Bolsheviks moved to hand power to

10010-654: The Russian Federation has some supporters, but is reformist rather than revolutionary, aiming to lessen the inequalities of Russia's market economy. Chinese economic reforms were started in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping , and since then China has managed to bring down the poverty rate from 53% in the Mao era to just 8% in 2001. After losing Soviet subsidies and support, Vietnam and Cuba have attracted more foreign investment to their countries, with their economies becoming more market-oriented. North Korea,

10164-1052: The Sixtiers and the New Left and hippie movements in the West, but even closer similarities can be found with the more intellectual-oriented Beat Generation . The Ukrainian Sixtiers movement was dominated by national ideas. Many Ukrainian Sixtiers defended the national language and culture, and freedom of artistic creativity. The most famous members of the movement were writers Ivan Drach , Valeriy Shevchuk , Mykola Vingranovsky, V. Drozd, Hryhir Tiutiunnyk , Borys Oliynyk , V. Donchyk, Vasyl Symonenko , Mykola Kholodny, Lina Kostenko , Yevhen Hutsalo ; painting artists Alla Horska , Viktor Zaretsky, Boris Chichibabin ; textile and painting artist Lyubov Panchenko ; literary critics Ivan Dziuba , Yevhen Sverstyuk ; director Les Tanyuk ; film directors Sergei Parajanov , Yuri Ilyenko ; art critics Roman Korogodsky, Y. Smyrny; and translators Hryhoriy Kochur, Mykola Lukash and Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska . The Sixtiers opposed official dogmatism, professed freedom of creative expression, cultural pluralism , and

10318-431: The Soviet Union . The declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created the Commonwealth of Independent States , although five of the signatories ratified it much later or did not do it at all. On the previous day, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union ) resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over its powers, including control of

10472-534: The Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev , who enacted a period of de-Stalinization and re-approached diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia in 1976. The Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong, established the People's Republic of China , which would follow its own ideological path of development following the Sino-Soviet split . Communism was seen as a rival of and a threat to Western capitalism for most of

10626-524: The Soviet model of rapid urbanization, Mao Zedong and his top aide Deng Xiaoping launched the Great Leap Forward in 1957–1961 with the goal of industrializing China overnight, using the peasant villages as the base rather than large cities. Private ownership of land ended and the peasants worked in large collective farms that were now ordered to start up heavy industry operations, such as steel mills. Plants were built in remote locations, due to

10780-555: The Soviets, built the hydrogen bomb , and strengthened the NATO alliance that covered Western Europe . According to Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Stalin's consistent and overriding goal after 1945 was to consolidate the nation's superpower status and in the face of his growing physical decrepitude, to maintain his own hold on total power. Stalin created a leadership system that reflected historic czarist styles of paternalism and repression yet

10934-473: The USSR ), founded and edited by Alexander Voronel and, after his imprisonment, by Mark Azbel and Alexander Luntz. The late 1980s, which were marked by an increase in informal organizations, saw a renewed wave of samizdat periodicals in the Soviet Union. Publications that were active during that time included Glasnost (edited by Sergei Grigoryants ), Ekspress-khronika ( Express-Chronicle, edited by Alexander Podrabinek ), Svobodnoye slovo ("Free word", by

11088-424: The USSR to inculcate Jewish consciousness and culture, writing in periodicals centered on cultural-literary information. Crimean Tatars , Volga Germans , and Meskhetian Turks also created samizdat literature, protesting the state's refusal to allow them to return to their homelands following Stalin's death. Descriptions in the samizdat literature of Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and Meskhetian Turks documenting

11242-471: The USSR, and they focused on advancing their cause along open, public routes, rather than underground routes. In opposition to both democratic and socialist samizdat, Slavophile samizdat grouped democracy and socialism together as Western ideals that were unsuited to the Eastern European mentality. Slavophile samizdat brought a nationalistic Russian perspective to the political debate and espoused

11396-778: The Ukrainian Socialist Bloc finished a distant third at 12.7%, and the Mensheviks obtained a disappointing fourth place at 3.0%. Most of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's seats went to the right-wing faction. Citing outdated voter-rolls, which did not acknowledge the party split, and the assembly's conflicts with the Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik–Left Socialist-Revolutionaries government moved to dissolve

11550-628: The United States, South Korea, and United Nations forces in the Korean War . While the war ended in a military stalemate, it gave Mao the opportunity to identify and purge elements in China that seemed supportive of capitalism. At first, there was close cooperation with Stalin, who sent in technical experts to aid the industrialization process along the line of the Soviet model of the 1930s. After Stalin's death in 1953, relations with Moscow soured – Mao thought Stalin's successors had betrayed

11704-470: The West. The longest-running and best-known samizdat periodical was A Chronicle of Current Events (Хроника текущих событий). It was dedicated to defending human rights by providing accurate information about events in the USSR. Over 15 years, from April 1968 to December 1982, 65 issues were published, all but two appearing in English translation. The anonymous editors encouraged the readers to utilize

11858-479: The abolition of capitalism. For Leninist communism, such goals, including short-term proletarian interests to improve their political and material conditions, can only be achieved through vanguardism , an elitist form of socialism from above that relies on theoretical analysis to identify proletarian interests rather than consulting the proletarians themselves, as is advocated by libertarian communists. When they engage in elections, Leninist communists' main task

12012-499: The actions of communist states, distanced from them, and developed a democratic road to socialism , which became known as Eurocommunism . This development was criticized by more orthodox supporters of the Soviet Union as amounting to social democracy . Since 1957, communists have been frequently voted into power in the Indian state of Kerala . In 1959, Cuban communist revolutionaries overthrew Cuba's previous government under

12166-462: The army and Mao's wife Jiang Qing . China's youth responded to Mao's appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist party leadership itself. It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. In the top leadership, it led to a mass purge of senior officials who were accused of taking a " capitalist road ", most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping . During

12320-478: The authorities began clamping down on them. In the summer of 1961, several meeting regulars were arrested and charged with " anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda " (Article 70 of the RSFSR Penal Code ), putting an end to most of the magazines. Not everything published in samizdat had political overtones. In 1963, Joseph Brodsky was charged with " social parasitism " and convicted for being nothing but

12474-485: The community"; this semantic constitution has led to numerous usages of the word in its evolution. Prior to becoming associated with its more modern conception of an economic and political organization, it was initially used to designate various social situations. After 1848, communism came to be primarily associated with Marxism , most specifically embodied in The Communist Manifesto , which proposed

12628-446: The country. Their content was Western rock and roll , jazz , mambo , and other music, and music by banned emigres, such as Pyotr Leshchenko and Alexander Vertinsky . They were sold and traded on the black market . Each disc is a thin, flexible plastic sheet recorded with a spiral groove on one side, playable on a normal phonograph turntable at 78 RPM. They were made from an inexpensive, available material: used X-ray film (hence

12782-557: The demobilization and migration of millions of soldiers and civilians. In the midst of this turmoil during the winter of 1946–1947, the Soviet Union experienced the worst natural famine in the 20th century. There was no serious opposition to Stalin as the secret police continued to send possible suspects to the gulag . Relations with the United States and Britain went from friendly to hostile, as they denounced Stalin's political controls over eastern Europe and his Berlin Blockade . By 1947,

12936-654: The dictator Fulgencio Batista . The leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro , ruled Cuba from 1959 until 2008. With the fall of the Warsaw Pact after the Revolutions of 1989 , which led to the fall of most of the former Eastern Bloc , the Soviet Union was dissolved on 26 December 1991. It was a result of the declaration number 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of

13090-490: The exception of North Korea, all of these states have started allowing more economic competition while maintaining one-party rule. The decline of communism in the late 20th century has been attributed to the inherent inefficiencies of communist economies and the general trend of communist governments towards authoritarianism and bureaucracy . While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally Communist state led to communism's widespread association with

13244-452: The feudal privilege, thereby taking the feudal ruling class out of existence. This was another key element behind the consolidation of capitalism as the new mode of production, the final expression of class and property relations that has led to a massive expansion of production. It is only in capitalism that private property in itself can be abolished. Similarly, the proletariat would capture political power, abolish bourgeois property through

13398-477: The former Eastern Bloc. In Nepal, Communists ( CPN UML and Nepal Communist Party ) were part of the 1st Nepalese Constituent Assembly , which abolished the monarchy in 2008 and turned the country into a federal liberal-democratic republic, and have democratically shared power with other communists, Marxist–Leninists, and Maoists ( CPN Maoist ), social democrats ( Nepali Congress ), and others as part of their People's Multiparty Democracy . The Communist Party of

13552-430: The general public at times came into contact with samizdat, most of the public lacked access to the few expensive samizdat texts in circulation and expressed discontent with the highly censored reading material made available by the state. The purpose and methods of samizdat may contrast with the purpose of the concept of copyright. Self-published and self-distributed literature has a long history in Russia. Samizdat

13706-535: The go-ahead for North Korea 's invasion of South Korea , expecting a short war. He was stunned when the Americans entered and defeated the North Koreans, putting them almost on the Soviet border. Stalin supported China 's entry into the Korean War , which drove the Americans back to the prewar boundaries, but which escalated tensions. The United States decided to mobilize its economy for a long contest with

13860-491: The government's handling of events. No unified political thought existed within samizdat; rather, authors debated from a variety of perspectives. Samizdat written from socialist, democratic and Slavophile perspectives dominated the debates. Socialist authors compared the current state of the government to the Marxist ideals of socialism and appealed to the state to fulfil its promises. Socialist samizdat writers hoped to give

14014-507: The historic circumstances in which it finds itself", and stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule through the Obshchina . The moderate Mensheviks (minority) opposed Lenin's Bolsheviks (majority) plan for socialist revolution before the capitalist mode of production was more fully developed. The Bolsheviks' successful rise to power was based upon the slogans such as "Peace, Bread, and Land", which tapped into

14168-418: The idea to group together different countries, such as Afghanistan and Hungary , has no adequate explanation. While the term Communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and news media to refer to countries ruled by Communist parties, these socialist states themselves did not describe themselves as communist or claim to have achieved communism; they referred to themselves as being

14322-464: The ideas of the Sixtiers began to spread in samizdat . As many as 200 Ukrainian Sixtiers were arrested in a 1965–1966 purge . Faced with fierce resistance from the party apparatus, some of the Sixtiers compromised with the authorities, while others evolved into political dissidents , members of the human rights movement, and open opposition to the regime. Communist Communism (from Latin communis , 'common, universal')

14476-562: The importance of cultural diversity and the uniqueness of Slavic cultures. Samizdat written from the Slavophile perspective attempted to unite the USSR under a vision of a shared glorious history of Russian autocracy and Orthodoxy . Consequently, the fact that the USSR encompassed a diverse range of nationalities and lacked a singular Russian history hindered the Slavophile movement. By espousing frequently racist and anti-Semitic views of Russian superiority, through either purity of blood or

14630-546: The inspiration of religious text . In the medieval Christian Church , some monastic communities and religious orders shared their land and their other property. Sects deemed heretical such as the Waldensians preached an early form of Christian communism . As summarized by historians Janzen Rod and Max Stanton, the Hutterites believed in strict adherence to biblical principles, church discipline, and practised

14784-442: The intensifying alienation of labor experienced by the proletariat, albeit with varying degrees of class consciousness . In periods of deep crisis, the resistance of the oppressed can culminate in a proletarian revolution which, if victorious, leads to the establishment of the socialist mode of production based on social ownership of the means of production, " To each according to his contribution ", and production for use . As

14938-630: The lack of technical experts, managers, transportation, or needed facilities. Industrialization failed, and the main result was a sharp unexpected decline in agricultural output, which led to mass famine and millions of deaths. The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact saw economic regression, with 1958 through 1961 being the only years between 1953 and 1983 in which China's economy saw negative growth. Political economist Dwight Perkins argues: "Enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. ... In short,

15092-594: The large percentage of Muslims who resided in the USSR. Jewish samizdat advocated for the end of repression of Jews in the USSR and some expressed a desire for aliyah , the ability to leave Russia for an Israeli homeland. The aliyah movement also broached broader topics of human rights and freedoms of Soviet citizens. However, a divide existed within Jewish samizdat between more militant authors who advocated Jewish emigration and wrote mostly in politically-focused periodicals, and those who argued that Jews should remain in

15246-660: The last Communist country that still practices Soviet-style Communism, is both repressive and isolationist. Communist political thought and theory are diverse but share several core elements. The dominant forms of communism are based on Marxism or Leninism but non-Marxist versions of communism also exist, such as anarcho-communism and Christian communism , which remain partly influenced by Marxist theories, such as libertarian Marxism and humanist Marxism in particular. Common elements include being theoretical rather than ideological, identifying political parties not by ideology but by class and economic interest, and identifying with

15400-430: The law of value would still apply to socialism and that the Soviet Union was socialist under this new definition, which was followed by other Communist leaders, many other communists maintain the original definition and state that Communist states never established socialism in this sense. Lenin described his policies as state capitalism but saw them as necessary for the development of socialism, which left-wing critics say

15554-607: The legacy of Communist states. Communism derives from the French word communisme , a combination of the Latin -rooted word communis (which literally means common ) and the suffix isme ( an act, practice, or process of doing something ) . Semantically, communis can be translated to "of or for the community", while isme is a suffix that indicates the abstraction into a state, condition, action, or doctrine . Communism may be interpreted as "the state of being of or for

15708-446: The long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity , Marxists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat . By 1888, Marxists employed the term socialism in place of communism , which had come to be considered an old-fashioned synonym for the former. It was not until 1917, with the October Revolution , that socialism came to be used to refer to

15862-489: The massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in World War I , the peasants' demand for land reform , and popular support for the soviets . 50,000 workers had passed a resolution in favour of Bolshevik demand for transfer of power to the soviets Lenin's government also instituted a number of progressive measures such as universal education , healthcare and equal rights for women . The initial stage of

16016-408: The misery of the proletariat  – a new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Marx and his associate Engels. In 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto . In 1917, the October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for

16170-533: The most advanced capitalist development; however, the Russian Empire was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry, and a minority of industrial workers. Marx warned against attempts "to transform my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophy theory of the arche générale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever

16324-420: The most practical means of reproducing samizdat during this time due to these copy machine restrictions. Usually, multiple copies of a single text would be simultaneously made on carbon paper or tissue paper , which were inexpensive and relatively easy to conceal. Copies would then be passed around within trusted networks. Samizdat distinguishes itself not only by the ideas and debates that it helped spread to

16478-482: The most well-known of these and have been a driving force in international relations during most of the 20th century. Classical Marxism is the economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Marx and Engels as contrasted with later developments in Marxism, especially Leninism and Marxism–Leninism. Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought that emerged after the death of Marx and which became

16632-536: The movement also composed petitions in defense of Ukrainian culture. The Club of Creative Youth "Contemporary" (founded in 1959–60) in Kyiv and the club "Snowdrop" (founded in 1962) in Lviv became centers of alternative national culture. The Sixtiers restored the traditions of the classical pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, which aspired to spiritual independence, political alienation, the ideals of civil society and service to

16786-573: The name roentgenizdat ). Each large rectangular sheet was trimmed into a circle and individually recorded using an improvised recording lathe . The discs and their limited sound quality resemble the mass-produced flexi discs and may have been inspired by it. Magnitizdat ( magnit- from magnitofon , the Russian word for tape recorder ) is the distribution of sound recordings on audio tape, often of bards , Western artists, and underground music groups. Magnitizdat replaced roentgenizdat , as it

16940-543: The note Samsebyaizdat (Самсебяиздат, "Myself by Myself Publishers") on the front page. Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad (там, tam 'there'), often from smuggled manuscripts. The Polish term for this phenomenon coined around 1980 was drugi obieg , or the "second circuit" of publishing. Sergo Anastasi Mikoyan claimed that decades prior to the early 1960s, offices and stores had to submit papers with examples of their typewriters' typeface to local KGB branches so that any printed text could be traced back to

17094-473: The official philosophy of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until World War I in 1914. Orthodox Marxism aims to simplify, codify, and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying the perceived ambiguities and contradictions of classical Marxism. The philosophy of orthodox Marxism includes the understanding that material development (advances in technology in

17248-501: The only element which places into the realm of possibility moving on from this mode of production. This dictatorship , based on the Paris Commune 's model, is to be the most democratic state where the whole of the public authority is elected and recallable under the basis of universal suffrage . Samizdat Samizdat (Russian: самиздат , pronounced [səmɨzˈdat] , lit.   ' self-publishing ' )

17402-804: The outset of the Khrushchev Thaw in the mid-1950s USSR poetry became very popular. Writings of a wide variety of poets circulated among the Soviet intelligentsia: known, prohibited, repressed writers as well as those young and unknown. A number of samizdat publications carried unofficial poetry, among them the Moscow magazine Sintaksis (1959–1960) by writer Alexander Ginzburg , Vladimir Osipov 's Boomerang (1960), and Phoenix (1961), produced by Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg . The editors of these magazines were regulars at impromptu public poetry readings between 1958 and 1961 on Mayakovsky Square in Moscow. The gatherings did not last long, for soon

17556-469: The party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline . Trotskyism overtook the left communists as the main dissident communist current, while more libertarian communisms , dating back to the libertarian Marxist current of council communism, remained important dissident communisms outside the Soviet Union. Following Lenin's democratic centralism , the Leninist parties were organized on

17710-401: The party who are full-time professional revolutionaries, as was conceived by Vladimir Lenin . Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism , to understand social class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation . It originates from

17864-411: The people. Since the freethinking Sixtiers failed to keep within the official ideological and aesthetic boundaries, their cultural activities caused dissatisfaction of the authorities. The end of 1962 marked the start of massive pressure on the nonconformist intelligentsia. The Sixtiers were not allowed to be published, and were accused of "formalism," "inaction," and "bourgeois nationalism". In response,

18018-416: The periodical's activities, until Sergei Kovalev , Tatyana Khodorovich and Tatyana Velikanova openly announced their readiness to resume publication. After being arrested and imprisoned, they were replaced, in turn, by others. Another notable and long-running (about 20 issues in the period of 1972–1980) publication was the refusenik political and literary magazine "Евреи в СССР" (Yevrei v SSSR, Jews in

18172-402: The political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism , its economic system , and mode of production , that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through

18326-581: The political injustices borne by those peoples are dominated by references to "genocide" and "concentration camps". Ukrainian samizdat opposed the assumed superiority of Russian culture over the Ukrainian and condemned the forced assimilation of Ukrainians to the Russian language. Ribs , "music on the ribs", "bone records", or roentgenizdat ( roentgen- from the Russian term for X-ray, named for Wilhelm Röntgen ) were homemade phonograph records , copied from forbidden recordings that were smuggled into

18480-424: The power of the socialist viewpoint. Because the state proved itself unwilling to reform, samizdat began to focus on alternative political systems. In Czechoslovakia itself, it became central to the underground counter-culture emerging under the normalization regime that followed the invasion. Within samizdat, several works focused on the possibility of a democratic political system. Democratic samizdat possessed

18634-558: The primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production . Communism in its modern form grew out of the socialist movement in 18th-century France , in the aftermath of the French Revolution . Criticism of the idea of private property in the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century through such thinkers as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably , Jean Meslier , Étienne-Gabriel Morelly , Henri de Saint-Simon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. During

18788-525: The priority of universal values over class ones. They were largely influenced by the Western humanistic culture, the traditions of the Executed Renaissance and the Ukrainian culture of the late XIX – early XX centuries. Cultural activities of the Sixtiers included informal literary readings and art exhibitions, vigils in memory of repressed artists, and theatre performances. The members of

18942-468: The productive forces continued to advance, the communist society , i.e. a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership , follows the maxim " From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs ." While it originates from the works of Marx and Engels, Marxism has developed into many different branches and schools of thought, with the result that there is now no single definitive Marxist theory. Different Marxian schools place

19096-440: The proletariat. According to communists, the proletariat can avoid mass unemployment only if capitalism is overthrown; in the short run, state-oriented communists favor state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy as a means to defend the proletariat from capitalist pressure. Some communists are distinguished by other Marxists in seeing peasants and smallholders of property as possible allies in their goal of shortening

19250-455: The ragged appearance of samizdat contrasting sharply with the smooth, well-produced appearance of texts passed by the censor's office for publication by the State. The form samizdat took gained precedence over the ideas it expressed and became a potent symbol of the resourcefulness and rebellious spirit of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. In effect, the physical form of samizdat itself elevated

19404-559: The reading of samizdat to a prized clandestine act. Samizdat originated from the dissident movement of the Russian intelligentsia , and most samizdat directed itself to a readership of Russian elites. While circulation of samizdat was relatively low, at around 200,000 readers on average, many of these readers possessed positions of cultural power and authority. Furthermore, with the simultaneous censorship of information and necessity of absorbing information to know how to censor it, many government officials became readers of samizdat. Although

19558-440: The religious emphasis with a rational and philanthropic basis. Notable among them were Robert Owen , who founded New Harmony, Indiana , in 1825, and Charles Fourier , whose followers organized other settlements in the United States, such as Brook Farm in 1841. In its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for

19712-561: The rise to state power of Vladimir Lenin 's Bolsheviks , which was the first time any avowedly communist party reached that position. The revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in which the Bolsheviks had a majority. The event generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement, as Marx stated that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by

19866-450: The same distribution channels in order to send feedback and local information to be published in subsequent issues. The Chronicle was distinguished by its dry, concise style and punctilious correction of even the smallest error. Its regular rubrics were "Arrests, Searches, Interrogations", "Extra-judicial Persecution", "In Prisons and Camps", "Samizdat update", "News in brief", and "Persecution of Religion". Over time, sections were added on

20020-404: The same period, Mao's personality cult grew to immense proportions. After Mao's death in 1976, the survivors were rehabilitated and many returned to power. Mao's government was responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims through starvation, persecution, prison labour , and mass executions. Mao has also been praised for transforming China from

20174-487: The source, to prosecute those who had used the typewriter to produce material deemed illegal. With the introduction of photocopying machines, the KGB's Fifth Directorate and Agitprop Department required individuals to get authorization to use printing office photocopiers to prevent the mass production of unapproved material, though restrictions could be bypassed by bribing employees. Privately owned typewriters were considered

20328-410: The state, samizdat works became increasingly focused on the state's violation of human rights, before shifting towards politics. The majority of samizdat texts were politically focused. Most of the political texts were personal statements, appeals, protests, or information on arrests and trials. Other political samizdat included analyses of various crises within the USSR, and suggested alternatives to

20482-663: The state-capitalist development and the Workers' in particular was critical of bureaucratization and development from above, while the Right Opposition was more supporting of state-capitalist development and advocated the New Economic Policy . Following Lenin's democratic centralism , the Leninist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base. They were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of

20636-429: The strength of Russian Orthodoxy, the Slavophile movement in samizdat alienated readers and created divisions within the opposition. Predominantly Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostalist, and Adventist groups authored religious samizdat texts. Though a diversity of religious samizdat circulated, including three Buddhist texts, no known Islamic samizdat texts exist. The lack of Islamic samizdat appears incongruous with

20790-516: The term communism fell out of use during this period. An early distinction between communism and socialism was that the latter aimed to only socialize production , whereas the former aimed to socialize both production and consumption (in the form of common access to final goods ). This distinction can be observed in Marx's communism, where the distribution of products is based on the principle of " to each according to his needs ", in contrast to

20944-545: The term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government . John Goodwyn Barmby is credited with the first use of communism in English, around 1840. Since the 1840s, the term communism has usually been distinguished from socialism . The modern definition and usage of the term socialism was settled by the 1860s, becoming predominant over alternative terms such as associationism ( Fourierism ), mutualism , or co-operative , which had previously been used as synonyms. Meanwhile,

21098-623: The term's widespread association with Marxism–Leninism and the Soviet-type economic planning model. In his essay "Judging Nazism and Communism", Martin Malia defines a "generic Communism" category as any Communist political party movement led by intellectuals ; this umbrella term allows grouping together such different regimes as radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge 's anti-urbanism. According to Alexander Dallin ,

21252-504: The upheaval of the French Revolution , communism emerged as a political doctrine under the auspices of François-Noël Babeuf , Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne , and Sylvain Maréchal , all of whom can be considered the progenitors of modern communism, according to James H. Billington . In the early 19th century, various social reformers founded communities based on common ownership. Unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced

21406-428: The upheaval of the French Revolution , communism emerged as a political doctrine under the auspices of François-Noël Babeuf , Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne , and Sylvain Maréchal , all of whom can be considered the progenitors of modern communism, according to James H. Billington . In the 20th century, several ostensibly Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in

21560-416: The vehicle for fundamental society-wide changes and ultimately leads to the emergence of new economic systems . As a term, orthodox Marxism represents the methods of historical materialism and of dialectical materialism, and not the normative aspects inherent to classical Marxism, without implying dogmatic adherence to the results of Marx's investigations. At the root of Marxism is historical materialism,

21714-447: The word samizdat derives from sam ( сам 'self, by oneself') and izdat ( издат , an abbreviation of издательство , izdatel′stvo 'publishing house'), and thus means 'self-published'. Ukrainian has a similar term: samvydav (самвидав), from sam 'self' and vydavnytstvo 'publishing house'. The Russian poet Nikolay Glazkov coined a version of the term as a pun in the 1940s when he typed copies of his poems and included

21868-472: The works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought , no single, definitive Marxist theory exists. Marxism considers itself to be the embodiment of scientific socialism but does not model an ideal society based on the design of intellectuals , whereby communism is seen as a state of affairs to be established based on any intelligent design; rather, it

22022-513: Was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access . This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship . Etymologically,

22176-500: Was a very strange element of the political landscape of Leonid Brezhnev 's era—feeling themselves practically dissidents, members of the Russian Party with rare exceptions took quite prestigious official positions in the world of writers or journalists," wrote Oleg Kashin in 2009. Samizdat covered a large range of topics, mainly including literature and works focused on religion, nationality, and politics. The state censored

22330-629: Was also created under Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia ; Tito's independent policies led to the Tito–Stalin split and expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948, and Titoism was branded deviationist . Albania also became an independent Marxist–Leninist state following the Albanian–Soviet split in 1960, resulting from an ideological fallout between Enver Hoxha , a Stalinist, and

22484-427: Was also quite modern. At the top, personal loyalty to Stalin counted for everything. Stalin also created powerful committees, elevated younger specialists, and began major institutional innovations. In the teeth of persecution, Stalin's deputies cultivated informal norms and mutual understandings which provided the foundations for collective rule after his death. For most Westerners and anti-communist Russians, Stalin

22638-652: Was also used to denote the representatives of the new generation of communist elites whose political views were formed in the late 1950s – early 1960s. These include politicians M. Gorbachev , O. Yakovlev, philosophers A. Zinoviev , M. Mamardashvili , Y. Levada , political scientists A. Bovin , F. Burlatsky, mass media editors V. Korotych , E. Yakovlev, S. Zalygin , poets Boris Slutsky , Robert Rozhdestvensky , Andrei Voznesensky , Yevgeny Yevtushenko , Alexander Kushner , Victor Sosnora , Bella Akhmadulina , Yunna Morits , Oleg Chukhontsev , dramatist Alexander Vampilov . and many others. Some parallels can be drawn between

22792-535: Was believed to be the atheist way of life. In Protestant England , communism was too phonetically similar to the Roman Catholic communion rite , hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists. Friedrich Engels stated that in 1848, at the time when The Communist Manifesto was first published, socialism was respectable on the continent, while communism was not; the Owenites in England and

22946-477: Was cheaper and more efficient method of reproduction that resulted in higher quality copies. After Bell Labs changed its UNIX licence in 1979 to make dissemination of the source code illegal, the 1976 Lions book which contained the source code had to be withdrawn, but illegal copies of it circulated for years. The act of copying the Lions book was often referred to as samizdat. In hacker and computer jargon,

23100-587: Was known as Trial of the Four . In the following years some samizdat content became more politicized and played an important role in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union . The earliest samizdat periodicals were short-lived and mainly literary in focus: Sintaksis (1959–1960), Boomerang (1960), and Phoenix (1961). From 1964 to 1970, communist historian Roy Medvedev regularly published The Political Journal (Политический дневник, or political diary), which contained analytical materials that later appeared in

23254-415: Was much more efficient, this property became worthless and the mass majority of workers could only survive by selling their labor to make use of someone else's machinery, and making someone else profit. Accordingly, capitalism divided the world between two major classes, namely that of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie . These classes are directly antagonistic as the latter possesses private ownership of

23408-472: Was never established, while some Marxist–Leninists state that it was established only during the Stalin era and Mao era , and then became capitalist states ruled by revisionists ; others state that Maoist China was always state capitalist, and uphold People's Socialist Republic of Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin, who first stated to have achieved socialism with

23562-407: Was the beginning of the development of vanguardism as an hierarchical party–elite that controls society, which resulted in a split between anarchism and Marxism , and Leninist communism assuming the dominant position for most of the 20th century, excluding rival socialist currents. Other communists and Marxists, especially social democrats who favored the development of liberal democracy as

23716-611: Was to purify communism by removing pro-capitalists and traditionalists by imposing Maoist orthodoxy within the Chinese Communist Party . The movement paralyzed China politically and weakened the country economically, culturally, and intellectually for years. Millions of people were accused, humiliated, stripped of power, and either imprisoned, killed, or most often, sent to work as farm laborers. Mao insisted that those he labelled revisionists be removed through violent class struggle . The two most prominent militants were Marshall Lin Biao of

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