‘To Overthrow the World’ Review: Communists in Control

Long before the founding of the Soviet Union, communist thinkers became convinced that without violence they would never achieve power

By Nicholas Clairmont. He reviewed the book To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism by Sean McMeekin.

Mr. Clairmont is the Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine. Excerpts:

"In 1797, as the revolution in France cooled down following the Reign of Terror, François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf stood trial for organizing a putsch against the governing directorate running Paris at the time."

"what he had in fact done—recruit insurrectionists from the ranks of the police and military units to join his so-called Conspiracy of the Equals, with the intent to seize weapons and food stores, take control of Paris neighborhood by neighborhood, and execute France’s new rulers, along with any foreigners, royalists and other named enemies."

"he introduces us to some nonviolent utopian socialists. Robert Owen, for instance, sought to set up a planned community in 1820s Indiana that would have abolished all private possession, including marriage. It failed."

"“communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box.”"

"there were other, earlier revolutions, notably those across many parts of Europe in 1848 and in Russia in 1905, that, while not ending in successful communist takeovers, revealed to Europe’s communist thinkers that without violence they would never achieve power."

"“The real secret of Marxism-Leninism,” he tells us, “was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered an immutable law of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation of war” to seize and maintain power. Here the death count becomes eye-watering: Hundreds of thousands of kulaks—a name coined to scapegoat those peasants who had failed to turn over enough grain—are killed; a famine beginning in 1921, exacerbated by poor central planning, leaves so many dead that it is impossible to accurately calculate the toll to the nearest million. All this before Stalin takes over."

"nearly 23,000 Polish elites and military officers purged, their bodies deposited in a Russian forest; more than 34,000 Latvians killed or disappeared by the Soviet secret police."

"“Many famous Soviet ‘public works’ projects,” Mr. McMeekin points out, “were built by conscripted, unpaid workers—that is, slave laborers. Children worked, too, particularly on the collective farms, where the twelve-hour day was common for farmhands under fourteen"

"The story of communism is more accurately read as a history of violence than as a history of ideas."