Silvio Pons - The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917-1991

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First published in Italian as Stato e Rivoluzione Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino 2012.

English translation Oxford University Press 2014

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First Edition published in 2014

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940483

ISBN 9780199657629

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eISBN 9780191054105

For Chiara

During the twentieth century, communism left its mark on the life, death, hopes, fears, dreams, nightmares, identity, and choices of a large part of humanity. It is not easy to find a single significant aspect of world history in the past century that was not in some way connected to it and did not come under its influence. Communism was many things together: a reality and a mythology, a state system and movement of parties, a closed elite and a mass politics, a progressive ideology and an imperial dominion, a project for a just society and an experiment on humanity, a pacifist rhetoric and a strategy of civil war, a liberating utopia and a system of concentration camps, an antagonist of world order and a form of anti-capitalist modernity. Communists were victims of dictatorial regimes and the creators of police states. Protagonists in social struggles, national liberation movements, and campaigns for citizens rights, they invariably founded totalitarian, oppressive, and liberticidal regimes. Their dogmatism, discipline, leadership cults, and organization were proverbial, as was their adaptability to very different social, political, and cultural contexts. The attraction or repulsion evoked by the states, parties, and societies that grew out of the communist experience for a long time defined individual lives, intellectual orientations, and collective psychology.