Draws on documentation released since the fall of the Soviet Union to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century.

• Introduction: 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-François 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 Kolár: Communism in 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: Balázs Szalontai: Political and Economic Relations between Communist States


• 18: Geoff Roberts: Averting Armageddon: The Communist Peace Movement, 1948-1956


• 19: Daniel Leese: The Cult of Personality and Symbolic Politics


• 20: Julia C. Strauss: Communist Revolution 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: The Politics of Plenty: Consumerism in Communist Societies


• PART 5: COMMUNISM AND SOCIAL RELATIONS


• 25: Marco Albeltaro: The Life of a Communist Militant


• 26: Jeremy Brown: Rural Life


• 27: Tuong Vu: Workers under Communism: Romance and Reality


• 28: Donna Harsch: Communism and Women


• 29: Donald Filtzer: Privilege and Inequality in Communist Society


• 30: Adrienne Lynn Edgar: Nation-Making and National Conflict under Communism


• PART 6: COMMUNISM AND CULTURE


• 31: Richard King: Cultural Revolution


• 32: Mark Gamsa: Communism and the Artistic Intelligentsia


• 33: Dean Vuletic: Popular Culture


• 34: Richard Madsen: Religion under Communism


• 35: Robert Edelman, Anke Hilbrenner, and Susan Brownell: Sport under Communism

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'.