S. A. Smith: Towards a Global History of Communism; PART I: IDEOLOGY; 1 Paresh Chattopadhyay: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Communism; 2 Lars T. Lih: Lenin and Bolshevism; 3 Kevin McDermott: Stalin and Stalinism; 4 Timothy Cheek: Mao and Maoism; PART 2: GLOBAL MOMENTS; 5 Jean-Francois Fayet: 1919; 6 Tim Rees: 1936; 7 Sergei Radchenko: 1956; 8 Maud Anne Bracke: 1968; 9 Matthias Middell: 1989; PART 3: GLOBAL COMMUNISM; 10 Alexander Vatlin and S. A. Smith: The Comintern; 11 Pavel Kolar: Communism in Eastern, Central, and South-Eastern Europe; 12 Yang Kuisong and S. A. Smith: Communism in China; 13 Anna Belogurova: Communism in Southeast Asia; 14 Mike Gonzalez: Communism in Latin America; 15 Anne Alexander: Communism in the Islamic World; 16 Allison Drew: Communism in Africa; PART 4: COMMUNIST POLITIES AND ECONOMIES; 17 Balazs Szalontai: Political and Economic Relations between Communist States; 18 Geoff Roberts: Communism and the Peace Movement; 19 Daniel Leese: Rituals of Power; 20 Julia Strauss: Communism and Political Terror; 21 Sheila Fitzpatrick: Popular Opinion under Communist Regimes; 22 Mark Harrison: Communism and Economic Modernization; 23 Felix Wemheuer: Collectivization and Famine; 24 Paul Betts: Consumption in Communist Societies; PART 5: COMMUNISM AND SOCIAL RELATIONS; 25 Marco Albeltaro: The Life of a Communist Militant; 26 Jeremy Brown: Rural Lives in Communist Societies; 27 Tuong Vu: Industrial Work in Communist Societies; 28 Donna Harsch: Women in Communist Societies; 29 Don Filtzer: Privilege and Inequality in Communist Societies; 30 Adrienne Lynn Edgar: Nation-Building and National Conflict in Communist Societies; PART 6: COMMUNISM AND CULTURE; 31 Richard King: Socialist Cultural Production; 32 Mark Gamsa: Communism and the Artistic Intelligentsia; 33 Dean Vuletic: Communism and Popular Culture; 34 Richard Madsen: Communism and Religion; 35 Robert Edelman, Anke Hilbrenner, and Susan Brownell: Communism and Sport

The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century.
In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.

S. A. Smith is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He was a graduate student at Moscow State University and Peking University in the late 1970s and early 1980s and taught for many years at the University of Essex. More recently, he was professor of comparative history at the European University Institute, Florence. He has written extensively on the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and is currently writing a book which compares the efforts of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes to eliminate 'superstition' from daily life, in areas such as popular religion, calendrical and life-cycle rituals, agriculture, and folk medicine, and which explores how sections of the populace engaged the regimes through 'politics of the supernatural'.