Timeline of communism, 1848 to today
The key ideas, revolutions, regimes and human costs of communism, in order. Death tolls are given as ranges with named sources, because archives, methods and definitions differ. Each entry lists the sources behind it; for the full story, follow the links to our articles.
Origins 1848–1916
A theory of history and revolution takes shape in Europe.
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1848
The Communist Manifesto is published
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write the programme of the Communist League, printed in London weeks before the February Revolution of 1848.
It frames history as class struggle and declares that "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
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1867
Capital, Volume I
Marx publishes the first volume of his critique of political economy, the theoretical core of later Marxist movements.
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1871
The Paris Commune
Radicals take over Paris in March 1871 and hold it until government troops retake the city in the "Bloody Week" of May.
Twenty years later Engels held it up as the model of revolutionary rule: "Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
Human cost Long-standing accounts gave far higher totals, but Robert Tombs's archival study (2012) argues the toll of Bloody Week was "greatly exaggerated" and estimates roughly 5,700–7,400 deaths.
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1903
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split
At its Second Congress, Russia's Social Democratic party divides over who may be a member. Lenin's faction, the Bolsheviks, wants a party of fully committed revolutionaries.
In What Is to Be Done? (1902) Lenin had called for an organization that would "consist of professional revolutionaries". The vanguard party became the model for communist parties that followed.
Read more: Lenin: a short biography
Revolution 1917–1927
The Bolsheviks seize Russia and build the first one-party communist state.
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1917Oct
The October Revolution
Eight months after the tsar's fall, Lenin's Bolsheviks seize power in the capital.
In the Constituent Assembly election that followed, the Bolsheviks won about a quarter of the votes and the Socialist Revolutionaries 58 percent. The Assembly met once, on 5 January 1918, and Red Guards prevented it from meeting again.
Read more: Lenin: a short biography
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1918
The Cheka and the Red Terror
The secret police founded in December 1917 becomes the instrument of an official terror, decreed on 5 September 1918.
The decree said class enemies should be isolated "in concentration camps" and that "all persons associated with White Guard organizations, plots and rebellions are liable to be shot."
Human cost Official figures recorded 6,300 Cheka executions in twenty provinces in 1918, "probably an understatement"; the historian Vladimir Brovkin puts the 1918 total at about 15,000.
Read more: Lenin: a short biography
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1918–1922
The Russian Civil War
Reds fight Whites, national movements and peasant armies while the regime requisitions grain by force.
Requisitioning left little margin for a bad harvest. When the Volga crops failed in 1921 the famine affected at least twenty million people; the American Relief Administration fed a reported ten million.
Human cost About five million people died in the famine of 1921–22. Counting war, terror, epidemics and famine, demographers have estimated total population losses in 1918–22 at over 15.5 million, about nine percent of the population.
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1919
The Comintern is founded
The Bolsheviks create the Communist International to lead revolutionary parties worldwide.
From 1920 member parties had to accept twenty-one conditions modelled on Bolshevik "democratic centralism" and break with the socialist parties of the Second International. The Comintern was disbanded in 1943.
Sources (1)
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1921Mar
Kronstadt crushed; the NEP begins
Sailors who had once backed the Bolsheviks demand free speech and an end to the party's monopoly on power. About 45,000 troops cross the ice to crush them.
While the revolt was under way, the Tenth Party Congress replaced grain requisitioning with a tax in kind (15 March), the start of the New Economic Policy, and passed a resolution on party unity (16 March).
Human cost Many rebels were killed in the fighting; many survivors were shot or sent to prison camps.
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1921Jul
The Chinese Communist Party is founded
Twelve or thirteen delegates, with two Comintern advisers present, meet in Shanghai from 23 July. The party later fixed 1 July as its founding day.
Mao Zedong was among the founders, though he is unlikely to have had a leading role at the meeting.
Read more: Mao Zedong: a short biography
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1922Dec
The USSR is formed
On 30 December the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Transcaucasian republics sign a treaty of union.
Stalin had become General Secretary of the party that year. A series of strokes ended Lenin's active role; he died on 21 January 1924.
Read more: Stalin: a short biography
Stalin's terror 1928–1945
Forced collectivization, famine, mass shootings and the Gulag; then world war.
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1929–1933
Forced collectivization and "dekulakization"
Stalin drives the peasantry into collective farms and deports better-off farmers branded "kulaks".
Human cost 1,804,000 people were deported as kulaks in 1930–31. In 1933 alone 151,000 deportees died in the "special settlements", a death rate of 14 percent.
Read more: Stalin: a short biography · Soviet forced population transfers
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1932–1933
The Holodomor and the Soviet famines
Grain seizures, blacklisted villages and a ban on flight turn famine into mass death, worst of all in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
In January 1933 the regime sealed off Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban to stop starving peasants leaving in search of food, while grain exports continued.
Human cost Demographers estimate 3.9 million excess deaths in Soviet Ukraine; Nicolas Werth gives 4 to 4.5 million for Ukraine and the Kuban. In Kazakhstan 1.1 to 1.4 million died, almost a third of the Kazakh population.
Read more: The Holodomor
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1934–1935
The Long March
Encircled by the Nationalists, the Communist armies break out of Jiangxi in October 1934 and retreat about 6,000 miles to Shaanxi.
Of the 86,000 troops who left Jiangxi, about 4,000 arrived in Shaanxi; other estimates of survivors are higher. The march solidified Mao Zedong's leadership.
Read more: Mao Zedong: a short biography
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1937–1938
The Great Terror
Secret "mass operations", with quotas set in advance, sweep up party members, officers, national minorities and ordinary citizens.
Order No. 00447 alone initially set quotas of 76,000 people to be shot and 193,000 to be sent to camps; in the "Polish operation" 111,000 people were sentenced to death.
Human cost In sixteen months from August 1937 over 1.5 million people were arrested and about 800,000 sentenced to death.
Read more: Stalin: a short biography · Repression and executions
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1939Aug
The Nazi–Soviet Pact
On 23 August Stalin and Hitler sign a non-aggression pact whose secret protocol divides Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
The protocol split Poland along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers and acknowledged Soviet interest in Bessarabia. The Red Army invaded eastern Poland on 17 September; the Baltic states were annexed in 1940. Moscow called the protocol a forgery for four decades, until the Congress of People's Deputies acknowledged and condemned it on 24 December 1989.
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1940Apr
The Katyn massacre
The NKVD shoots Polish officers, policemen, officials and others captured in 1939.
Moscow blamed the Germans for decades. Only on 13 April 1990 did a TASS statement acknowledge Soviet responsibility.
Human cost A 1959 KGB note to Khrushchev put the total at 21,857; Nicolas Werth gives 25,700 Poles executed in April 1940.
Read more: Stalin: a short biography
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1945–1948
Communist rule is imposed on Eastern Europe
Behind the Red Army, coalition governments give way to communist control.
Managed elections gave the government fronts 89 percent of the vote in Poland, 79 percent in Bulgaria and 98 percent in Romania, where the share rose from 91 percent in 1946. In March 1946, at Fulton, Missouri, Churchill gave the speech remembered for its warning of an "iron curtain".
Read more: The Securitate · The Stasi
Expansion 1946–1964
Communist states spread across Eastern Europe and Asia as the Cold War hardens.
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1948Sep
North Korea is founded
On 9 September 1948 Kim Il Sung, chosen by the Soviet occupation authorities in 1946 to head the north, becomes premier of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
His family has ruled North Korea ever since.
Read more: North Korea's prison camps
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1949Oct
The People's Republic of China
On 1 October Mao proclaims the People's Republic; Chiang Kai-shek's forces withdraw to Taiwan.
Human cost In the 1950–53 campaign against "counter-revolutionaries", over 712,000 people were officially executed, exceeding the quota of 0.1 percent of the population that Mao himself had set.
Read more: Mao Zedong: a short biography
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1950–1953
The Korean War
Kim Il Sung's army invades the South in June 1950 with Stalin's cautious support. A UN-authorized force led by the United States, and then China, intervene.
An uneasy truce in 1953 left the peninsula divided, as it remains.
Human cost It was the second deadliest conflict since the Second World War, and civilians made up a large share of the dead.
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1953
Stalin dies; the East German uprising
Stalin dies on 5 March. On 16 June East Berlin builders strike against raised work quotas; the next day unrest spreads to 373 towns and Soviet tanks crush it.
An amnesty decreed on 27 March released over 1.5 million prisoners within three months.
Human cost About 18 million people passed through the Gulag camps and colonies in 1929–53, by Anne Applebaum's count; 2,468,524 were held on 1 January 1953. The archival death records are incomplete, omitting, for example, prisoners released when close to death.
Read more: Stalin: a short biography · East Germany's border
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1956
Khrushchev's Secret Speech; Hungary crushed
In February Khrushchev denounces Stalin's "cult of personality" to a closed session of the party congress. In October–November Soviet troops crush the Hungarian revolution.
The speech condemned the arrests and execution of loyal party members, but left out collectivization and any admission that other leaders, including Khrushchev, shared responsibility. In Hungary, Imre Nagy's government had moved to end one-party rule and leave the Warsaw Pact.
Human cost About 2,500 insurgents and 700 Soviet soldiers were killed; some 200,000 people fled. The Kádár regime's courts later convicted 22,000 people and executed at least 200.
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1957
Djilas publishes The New Class
Milovan Djilas, Yugoslavia's vice president in 1953, argues in The New Class that communism did not lead to the 'withering away' of the state.
Already serving a sentence for his criticism, he was given seven more years after the book appeared in the West, and was not freed until 1966.
Read more: Yugoslavia's market socialism
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1958–1962
The Great Leap Forward
Mao forces China's peasants into vast communes and demands impossible harvests. The result is the largest famine in history.
When Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticized the policy at Lushan in 1959, Mao turned on him — a decision the party itself later called "entirely wrong".
Human cost Demographers estimate about 30 million premature deaths in 1959–61; Yang Jisheng counts 36 million and Frank Dikötter 45 million.
Read more: The Great Chinese Famine · Mao Zedong: a short biography
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1959
Castro takes power in Cuba
Fidel Castro's revolution ousts Fulgencio Batista. On 16 April 1961 Castro declares it a socialist revolution; the next day an exile force, Brigade 2506, lands at the Bay of Pigs and is defeated within two days.
The Soviet missiles in Cuba in October 1962 were "the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict".
Read more: Cuba's refugee waves · Cuba's exit restrictions
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1959Mar
The Tibetan uprising
A revolt against Chinese rule fails, and the Dalai Lama flees to India.
China had sent its army into Tibet in 1950. About 80,000 people followed the Dalai Lama into exile.
Read more: Religion under Chinese communism
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1961Aug
The Berlin Wall goes up
On the morning of 13 August Berliners wake to find barbed wire dividing their city, put up to stop the flight from the East.
Between 1949 and 1961 about 2.7 million people had fled the GDR for West Germany.
Human cost At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989.
Read more: East Germany's border
High tide 1965–1984
Upheaval in China, killing fields in Cambodia, and growing dissent in the Soviet bloc.
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1966–1976
The Cultural Revolution
Mao launches a movement against his own party that convulses China for a decade.
By the party's own later verdict, the movement "was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong". Head of state Liu Shaoqi was among the leaders "persecuted to death".
Human cost In rural China alone, between 750,000 and 1.5 million people were killed and 36 million subjected to political persecution (Walder and Su).
Read more: Mao Zedong: a short biography
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1968Aug
The Prague Spring is crushed
Alexander Dubček's reforms try to humanize communist rule. On 20–21 August Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invade.
Moscow justified the invasion with what became the Brezhnev Doctrine: the right to intervene wherever a communist government was threatened. Dubček was forced out in April 1969 and censorship restored.
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1973Dec
The Gulag Archipelago
The YMCA Press in Paris publishes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet camps.
The book was the immediate cause of his expulsion: on 13 February 1974 he was stripped of citizenship and deported to West Germany.
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1974–1991
The Derg in Ethiopia
A Marxist military junta, the Derg, overthrows Emperor Haile Selassie on 12 September 1974. Mengistu Haile Mariam, who seizes full control in 1977, leads the "Red Terror" of 1976–78 against opponents.
Counterinsurgency policies, including the forced relocation of millions of rural people, helped create famine. Mengistu was later convicted of genocide in absentia; he has lived in Zimbabwe, which refuses to extradite him.
Human cost Most experts put the Red Terror's dead at between 10,000 and 150,000. Human Rights Watch holds the Mengistu government directly responsible for at least half a million civilian deaths over its rule.
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1975Apr
The fall of Saigon
On 30 April North Vietnamese tanks roll through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, ending the war.
In the years that followed, large numbers fled Indochina by sea as "boat people".
Human cost The UNHCR has estimated that 250,000 boat people died at sea, and 929,600 reached asylum.
Read more: Academic restrictions in Vietnam
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1975–1979
The Khmer Rouge regime
Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge rule Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
Human cost About 1.7 million people died, 21 percent of the population.
Sources (1)
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1978Dec
Deng Xiaoping turns to reform
Two years after Mao's death, a party plenum in December 1978 opens the era of reform led by Deng Xiaoping.
The party calls the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee "a crucial turning point of far-reaching significance".
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1978
The Power of the Powerless
Václav Havel, a member of the Charter 77 human rights movement, writes his essay on dissent under communist rule. It circulates in samizdat.
Havel was arrested in 1979. On 29 December 1989 he was elected president of Czechoslovakia.
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1979–1989
The Soviet war in Afghanistan
Soviet troops invade on Christmas Eve 1979 to keep a friendly socialist government in power.
The United States aided the insurgents. The last Soviet forces withdrew in February 1989.
Human cost Estimates of Afghan deaths range from about 877,000 (Khalidi) and 1.25 million (Sliwinski) to as high as 1.7 million (Noorzoy). By 1990–91, 6.3 million Afghans were living in refugee camps.
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1980Aug
Solidarity
A strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard on 14 August spreads across Poland. The agreement of 31 August is followed on 17 September by the founding of Solidarity, an independent trade union.
About 9.5 million people were members in 1981. Martial law, declared in the night of 12–13 December 1981, suspended the union.
Sources (1)
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1980
The Mariel boatlift
Over six months about 125,000 Cubans cross to the United States from the port of Mariel.
Read more: Cuba's refugee waves
Collapse 1985–1991
Reform in Moscow unravels the bloc; by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union is gone.
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1985Mar
Gorbachev comes to power
Mikhail Gorbachev becomes party leader and launches glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
When a reactor exploded at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986, the authorities did not acknowledge the blast for three days.
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1989Jun
The Tiananmen Square massacre
Protests that began on 15 April end on the night of 3–4 June, when the army storms the square with tanks.
Human cost The government said "over 200" were killed, including 36 students. Other estimates range from hundreds to about 2,600; a British diplomatic cable's figure of 10,000 has not been corroborated.
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1989Nov
The Berlin Wall falls
On 9 November a poorly briefed spokesman says new travel rules apply to Berlin too, and the Wall is opened.
In June Solidarity had swept Poland's partly free elections; Hungary opened its border to the West; Czechoslovakia got a non-communist government in December; and in Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were executed on 25 December.
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1991Dec
The Soviet Union dissolves
A hardline coup fails in August. In early December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus form the Commonwealth of Independent States; Gorbachev resigns on 25 December.
After the coup Yeltsin banned the Communist Party's activities.
Aftermath 1992–today
A famine in North Korea, the reckoning with the archives, and five states still ruled by communist parties.
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1995mid-1990s
North Korea's famine
Famine sweeps North Korea in the mid-1990s.
A UN Commission of Inquiry in 2014 estimated that 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners were still held in the country's camps.
Human cost Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland put deaths at 600,000 to 1 million, 3–5 percent of the population, with 2 million an absolute ceiling. Higher claims of 2.8 million or 3.5 million have not been verified.
Read more: North Korea's prison camps
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1997
The Black Book of Communism
A team of historians led by Stéphane Courtois attempts a global count of the victims of communist regimes.
Courtois's introduction arrived at a total of about a hundred million deaths. Two of the book's own authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, publicly rejected the introduction and its total.
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Today
Five states still ruled by communist parties
Five self-declared communist states remain: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
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