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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Unhumans (2024): A Book Note
What the 2024 polemic Unhumans argues about communist revolutions and the American left, who endorsed it, and how reviewers on the left and right received it.
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Albania's Cultural Revolution: The First Atheist State
How Enver Hoxha copied Mao's Cultural Revolution, closed all 2,169 of Albania's churches and mosques in 1967, and jailed priests for baptisms.
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Repression Under Communism: Executions, Camps and Famines
The documented human cost of communist rule — the Soviet Terror, China's famine, Cambodia's killing fields, North Korea's camps — with the evidence.
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Turkmenistan: How a Soviet Party Boss Became Turkmenbashi
Turkmenistan's dictatorship was built by its last Communist Party chief. Today it scores 1 out of 100 for freedom and has passed power from father to son.
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Faith Under the Party: Religion in Communist China
How the Chinese Communist Party has controlled and punished religion — from the Cultural Revolution to Xinjiang's camps and Xi Jinping's 'sinicization'.
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Leaving Cuba: How Castro's State Controlled Who Could Go
For decades Cubans needed the state's permission to leave their own country. The exit permit ended in 2013 — but passport denials and travel bans did not.
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Cuba's Exodus: Six Decades of Refugee Waves
From the first exiles of 1959 to Mariel, the 1994 rafters and the record exodus of 2022–23: how and why millions of Cubans have fled Castro's revolution.
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North Korea's Political Prison Camps: The Hidden Gulag
Inside North Korea's kwanliso, where a UN inquiry found hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have died through starvation, forced labour and execution.
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Who Owns North Korea? Property, Rations and Control
How North Korea's state took the land, the factories and the food supply — and fought the markets that grew up after the famine of the 1990s.
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Thought Control in Vietnam: The Party and Its Intellectuals
From the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm purge to re-education camps and jailed lecturers: how Vietnam's Communist Party has policed scholars and writers.
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The Hundred Flowers Campaign: Mao's Invitation and Purge
In 1957 Mao invited China's intellectuals to criticize the Party, then purged them: about 550,000 branded 'rightists'. He called it an 'overt scheme'.
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Howard Zinn on Communism: What He Said and What He Left Out
In 1988 Howard Zinn said the Russian Revolution killed 'about 100 people.' What he said about communism, in context, and what the record shows.
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North Korea's Information Blockade: Propaganda and Punishment
How North Korea keeps its people from the outside world: one state news source, registered radios and TVs, and prison for watching South Korean dramas.
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China's Hukou System: How the Party Tied Peasants to the Land
Since 1958 China's household registration system has bound people to their birthplace, splitting citizens into urban and rural castes.
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Cuba's Special Period: The Crisis After the Soviet Collapse
When Soviet support vanished, Cuba's economy shrank by a third and daily calories fell from 2,899 to 1,863: the 'Special Period' of the 1990s.
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The Berlin Wall and East Germany's Deadly Border
Why East Germany walled in its own people: the flight of 2.7 million, the Berlin Wall, mines and a shoot-to-kill order — and the hundreds who died.
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The Great Chinese Famine, 1959–61: Mao's Great Leap Disaster
How Mao's Great Leap Forward — communes, impossible grain targets, procurement and exports — caused the largest famine in history, killing 30–45 million.
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Mao Zedong Thought: The Ideology the Party Still Defends
What Mao Zedong Thought taught, what it cost, and how the Communist Party kept it as doctrine while blaming its disasters on Mao's 'errors'.
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Romania's War on Faith: The Churches Under Communism
How Romania's communist regime abolished the Greek-Catholic Church, let its bishops die in prison, jailed priests like Gheorghe Calciu and bulldozed churches.
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Hunger for Export: Food Rationing in Ceaușescu's Romania
How Ceaușescu's drive to repay Romania's foreign debt brought ration cards, unheated flats and empty shops in the 1980s, until the regime fell in 1989.
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Stalin's Deportations: The Forced Transfer of Whole Peoples
How Stalin's regime deported 1.8 million 'kulaks' and entire nations — Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Soviet Germans and more — and how many died in exile.
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The Holodomor: Stalin's Famine in Ukraine, 1932–33
How Stalin's grain seizures, village blacklists and a ban on flight turned a famine into the Holodomor, killing about four million people in Soviet Ukraine.
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Yugoslav Market Socialism: The Third Way That Failed
Tito's self-management promised a middle way between capitalism and Soviet planning. It ended in foreign debt, mass emigration and 2,000% inflation.