The history of communism, told from the evidence

From the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 to the party-states that rule today: how communist regimes took power, how they governed, and what it cost the people who lived under them — documented with archival records, survivor testimony and the work of historians.

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Latest articles

• Joseph Stalin: A Short Biography

  How Stalin won Lenin's succession and ruled through collectivization, famine, the Great Terror and mass deportation — with the archival record.

• Vladimir Lenin: A Short Biography

  Lenin built the first communist state: the vanguard party, the seizure of power in 1917, the Cheka and the Red Terror — in his own words and documents.

• The Securitate: Romania's Communist Secret Police

  How Romania's Securitate, built under Soviet advisers in 1948, ran arrests without trial, the Pitești tortures, a typewriter registry and plots abroad.

• Cuba's Healthcare: The Showcase and the Evidence

  Cuba's doctors and infant mortality figures are the regime's pride. What researchers, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch have found behind them.

• The Stasi: How East Germany Spied on Its Own People

  How East Germany's Stasi used 91,000 officers, 189,000 informants, secret prisons and 'quiet terror' to control a nation — and what its files revealed.

• Communist Leaders: A Reference List

  The leaders of the world's communist states, from Lenin to Xi Jinping, with their dates and the offices they held, country by country.

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• Soviet Union
• People's Republic of China
• Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge
• North Korea
• Cuba
• Eastern Europe
• Vietnam and Laos
• Communist Leaders
• Ideology and Theory
• Famines
• Camps and Repression
• Walls, Borders and Flight
• Religion Under Communism
• Censorship and Propaganda
• Planned Economies
• Communism and the West
• Cold War
• Dissidents and Resistance