![]() ![]() The temptation to steer the course of “communism” in one’s own country personally, rather than distribute power through faceless institutional mechanisms, meant that party power inevitably ended up in the hands of a single dictator or a very small ruling clique. Yet the “strong leader” paradigm puts the party in a double bind: every successful communist revolution (fuelled by ideals and action) has been solidified (in practice and policies) with recourse to despotic measures. In a contemporary example, we see how the idea of the communist party in North Korea has adaptively accommodated its leaders’ insistence on juche (“self-reliance”) as a feature in the ascent towards true socialism. The rhetoric of pan-European proletarian solidarity paled in the aftermath of Stalin’s decision to sign a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1939. Individual leaders could stretch the interpretation of the “communist idea” to remarkable lengths when necessary, as Stalin did when he unapologetically rationalised actions aimed at shoring up national security and “socialism in one country” in the 1930s. “The global idea of the communist party”, in this study, is an idea that was incessantly and often unpredictably shaped by decisive leaders who seized the opportunities they had to monopolise power in its name. ![]() McAdams’ thesis is quite clear: one can only make sense of the history of the communist party – its rise (or rejection) in unexpected places, its unexpected longevity in other places, its obvious diversity of forms (compare Cuba and Cambodia, for instance) – by examining the crucial impact of the individual personalities who dominated the party in each instance. Yet it was individual leaders who made all the difference. Party members themselves emphasised the importance of its institutional features: party cells and directives, soviets and committees, the Comintern and its Congresses, and so forth. The communist party was a global institution with a notoriously “institutional” structure, codified in its characteristic jargon. ![]() Here we see the major junctures of its development (and reversals) on every continent, in a narrative that shows how diverse, adaptable and even incongruous different communist party strategies could be. Vanguard of the Revolution is the first book of its kind to offer a global view of the party’s 20th-century history. James McAdams, Nicolae Ceaușescu “sought security in his own clan” and allowed his wife to “foster her own personality cult”.įor the most part, answers to basic questions such as “What was the communist party?”, “Why did exert it such extraordinary appeal?” and “Why did it collapse so abruptly?” have been parcelled out in scholarly works and popular discussions looking at the party’s rise and fall in a specific place, in the singular context of a particular nation’s politics. Following the Second World War, Italy’s charismatic Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti positioned his party as a force for national reconciliation after winning nearly one-third of the popular vote in democratic elections in 1948, the Communists remained a presence in successive coalition governments. ![]() Meanwhile, across the border in China, Mao was living conspicuously simply in a cave and tending his vegetable garden to bolster the credibility of his revolutionary agenda. He simultaneously purged his party ranks of its highest members in show trials and launched the Great Terror that would send millions of ordinary Soviet citizens into the gulag. In the interwar years, Stalin propagandised the stupendous achievements of Soviet industrialisation, such as the opening of the opulent Moscow metro system. ![]()
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