Howard Zinn on Communism: What He Said and What He Left Out

By D. R. Ashworth · November 25, 2024 · Updated October 18, 2026 · 4 min read

• Communism and the West
• Soviet Union
• Ideology and Theory

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has more than 2 million copies in print and has been called “a cultural icon” (Wineburg). Zinn, who died in 2010, wrote mainly about America. But in a 1988 interview recorded at a conference on anti-communism at Harvard, he set out his view of communism itself (Zinn, 1988). It is worth reading closely, because it illustrates an argument still common today: that communism’s ideals can be separated from what communist states did.

Quotations below are from the transcript published by HowardZinn.org, whose editors note that it was edited for sentence structure and advise checking the audio before quoting.

What Zinn said

Zinn was not an admirer of the Soviet Union. When he learned about it, he said, “I didn’t like what it was doing,” even though “they introduced health care and they did a lot of reforms.” He named “Soviet secret police” and “Stalinism” as the “bad” parts of communism and declared: “Sure, I’m against secret police and dictatorships and Stalinism and imperialism and sending troops into Hungary.” Americans who hated communism, he said, were “thinking communists: Stalin, the Soviet Union, firing squads, you know, the the secret police” (Zinn, 1988).

But he urged his audience to “separate those parts from that original idea, which I think is still a good idea.” After reading the Communist Manifesto as a young shipyard worker, he said, he became “in my head, a communist with a small C” — “Communism with a small C is somebody who believes in the idea of communism.” He closed by saying he was “for a world which might realize that original dream of socialists and anarchists and communists which we badly need” (Zinn, 1988).

Asked about the claim that communists seek violent overthrow, he replied that violent revolution “is not something that’s peculiar to communists,” and added: “I might say that the Russian Revolution was a revolution in which about 100 people got killed. The American Revolution was a revolution which tens of thousands of people got, you know…” He went on: “The greatest violence in history has not been committed by movements. It’s been committed by governments” (Zinn, 1988).

What the record shows

Zinn may have had in mind only the seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. But the Russian Revolution did not end there; it created a state, and that state’s record is now documented from its own archives. The historian Nicolas Werth, summarizing that research, reports:

• The Great Terror, 1937–1938: within sixteen months more than 1.5 million people were arrested; about 800,000 were sentenced to death by emergency tribunals that heard cases “with no defense and in the absence of the accused.” The operations were “decided and planned by Stalin in person.”
• The famines of 1931–1933: historians agree they “were not the result of poor weather conditions but directly caused by regime policies.” Between 4 and 4.5 million died in Ukraine and the Kuban, and between 1.1 and 1.4 million in Kazakhstan (Werth, Sciences Po).

Zinn’s own principle — that “the greatest violence in history” is committed by governments — applies with full force to the governments that communist revolutions created. That is the difficulty with his argument. He condemned the secret police and the firing squads, but treated them as a separate matter from the “original idea.” The communist states this site documents were built by people who held that idea, in its name, and with the conviction that it justified the means.

Zinn as a historian

Even critics credit Zinn’s stories with acquainting students “with a history too often hidden.” But the Stanford education scholar and historian Sam Wineburg, examining A People’s History in 2012, found that it “relies almost entirely on secondary sources, with no archival research,” and lacks footnotes, “thwarting inquisitive readers who seek to retrace the author’s interpretations.” He criticized the book’s “undue certainty”: between 1980 and the 2003 edition, he found, the chapter on the Second World War “remained virtually untouched by decades of prodigious scholarship” (Wineburg). For many students, Wineburg warned, A People’s History “will be the first full-length history book they read, and for some, it will be the only one.”

The problem with Zinn’s 1988 remark is not a matter of interpretation. An account of the Russian Revolution that counts about a hundred dead and stops there leaves out the millions killed by the state it brought to power.

Why it matters

Zinn’s argument — that communism’s ideal is good and its crimes are a separate story — is still widely heard. History does not support the separation. The Soviet secret police, the famines and the Terror were not departures by bad men from a good idea; they were how the idea was put into practice, by the people who believed in it most. Honest teaching about communism must include both the dream and what was done to make it real.

Further reading

• The Holodomor and Soviet forced population transfers on this site.
• “The Black Book of Communism” by Stéphane Courtois
• “Gulag: A History” by Anne Applebaum
• “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe” by Anne Applebaum
• “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” by Timothy Snyder
• Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States — read it alongside its critics.

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