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355 books match the query 'Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism' and 29 start with a

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A Cardboard Castle?

An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991

The National Security Archive Mastny

Central European University Press, 2005

This is the first book to document, analyze, and interpret the history of the Warsaw Pact based on the archives of the alliance itself. As suggested by the title, the Soviet bloc military machine that held the West in awe for most of the Cold War does not appear from the inside as formidable as outsiders often believed, nor were its strengths and weaknesses the same at different times in its surprisingly long history, extending for almost half a century. The introductory study by Mastny assesses the controversial origins of the "superfluous" alliance, its subsequent search for a purpose, its crisis and consolidation despite congenital weaknesses, as well as its unexpected demise. Most of the 193 documents included in the book were top secret and have only recently been obtained from Eastern European archives by the PHP project. The majority of the documents were translated specifically for this volume and have never appeared in English before. The introductory remarks to individual documents by co-editor Byrne explain the particular significance of each item. A chronology of the main events in the history of the Warsaw Pact, a list of its leading officials, a selective multilingual bibliography, and an analytical index add to the importance of a publication that sets the new standard as a reference work on the subject and facilitate its use by both students and general readers.

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A Century of Populist Demagogues

Eighteen European Portraits, 1918–2018

Ivan T. Berend

Central European University Press, 2020

The renowned historian Ivan T. Berend discusses populist demagoguery through the presentation of eighteen politicians from twelve European countries spanning World War I to the present. Berend defines demagoguery, reflects on its connections with populism, and examines the common features and differences in the demagogues’ programs and language.

Mussolini and Hitler, the “model demagogues,” are only briefly discussed, as is the election of Donald Trump in the United States and its impact on Europe. The eighteen detailed portraits include two communists, two fascists, and several right-wing and anti-EU politicians, extending across the full range of demagoguery. The author covers Béla Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, weaving through Codreanu and Gömbös from the 1930s, on to Stahremberg and Haider in Austria, and then more broadly throughout Europe from Ceaușescu, Milošević, Tuđjman, Izetbegović, Berlusconi, Wilders, to the two Le Pens, Farage, and Boris Johnson, Orbán and the two Kaczyńskis. Each case includes an analysis of the time and place and is illustrated with quotations from the demagogues’ speeches.

This book is a warning about the continuing threat of populist demagogues both for their subjects and for history itself. Berend insists on the crucial importance for Europe to understand the reality behind their promises and persuasive language as imperative to impeding their success.

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A Certain Amount of Madness

The Life Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara

Amber Murrey

Pluto Press, 2018

Thomas Sankara was one of Africa's most important anti-imperialist leaders of the late 20th Century. His declaration that fundamental socio-political change would require a 'certain amount of madness' drove the Burkinabe Revolution and resurfaced in the country's popular uprising in 2014.

This book looks at Sankara's political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today. Analyses of his synthesis of Pan-Africanism and humanist Marxist politics, as well as his approach to gender, development, ecology and decolonisation offer new insights to Sankarist political philosophies. Critical evaluations of the limitations of the revolution examine his relationship with labour unions and other aspects of his leadership style. His legacy is revealed by looking at contemporary activists, artists and politicians who draw inspiration from Sankarist thought in social movement struggles today, from South Africa to Burkina Faso.

In the 30th anniversary of his assassination, this book illustrates how Sankara's political praxis continues to provide lessons and hope for decolonisation struggles today.

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A Communist Odyssey

The life of József Pogány/John Pepper

Thomas Sakmyster

Central European University Press, 2012

A group of Central European communists, most of them Hungarians, in the interwar period served the world communist movement as international cadres of the Comintern, the Moscow-based Communist International. As an important member of this cohort, József Pogány played a major role in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the "March Action" in Germany in 1921, and, under the name of John Pepper, in the development of the American Communist Party of the 1920s. During the 1920s he was an important official in the Comintern apparatus and undertook missions on three continents. A prolific writer and effective organizer, he was one of the most flamboyant and controversial communists of his era. Some of his comrades praised him as "the Hungarian Christopher Columbus." Others, like Trotsky, called him a "political parasite."This study is based on newly available primary sources from Hungary, Russia, and the United States; it is the first ever written about this colorful and well-travelled Hungarian communist. Examines Pogány's development as a socialist and communist, the influence of his Jewish origins on his career, the reasons for his remarkable success in the United States, and the circumstances that led to his arrest and execution in the Stalinist terror.

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A Concise Field Guide to Post-Communist Regimes

Actors, Institutions, and Dynamics

Bálint Madlovics

Central European University Press, 2022

While the literature of hybrid regimes has given up the presumption that post-communist countries must democratize, its language and concepts still mostly relate to Western democracies. Magyar and Madlovics strongly argue for a vocabulary and grammar tailored to the specifics of the region. In 120 theses they unfold a conceptual framework with (1) a typology of post-communist regimes and (2) a detailed presentation of ideal-type actors and the political, economic, and social phenomena in these regimes. The book is a more digestible companion to the 800-page The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), which was a detailed theoretical study with plenty of empirical illustrations.

Each of the 120 theses contains a statement and its concise discussion supported by illustrative tables, figures, and QR-codes that connect the interested reader to the more detailed analysis in the Anatomy. In a condensed variety, this book has kept the holistic approach of the Anatomy and treats the spheres of political, market, and communal action as parts of a single, coherent whole. The endeavor to synthesize a vast range of ideas does not, however, result in a too complicated text. On the contrary, freed from the implicit presumptions of democracy theory, the new terminology yields a readily usable toolkit of unambiguous means of expression to speak about post-communism.

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A Culture of Corruption?

Coping with Government in Post-communist Europe

William L. Miller

Central European University Press, 2001

Based upon surveys and interviews with government officials and citizens, this book focuses on issues such as bribery, corruption, inefficiency and freedom of information in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The authors go beyond an analysis of public perceptions and behaviour and look at public attitudes towards proposals for reform. They reveal how the problem of citizens' interactions with officials varies in kind as well as in degree across the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

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A Documentary History of Communism and the World

From Revolution to Collapse

Edited by Robert V. Daniels

Brandeis University Press, 1994

In the ten years since the last edition of this book, the world has undergone tremendous and, seemingly irrevocable change. With the virtual demise of the international communist movement and the increasing isolation of the remaining old-style regimes, communism has become history. Robert V. Daniels has updated his definitive work to chronicle the last years of international communism. It contains a new chapter with 22 documents pertaining to such key ideas and events as perestroika, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the Tiananmen Massacre. Together with his Documentary History of Communism in Russia, this book provides a complete documentary history of the communist movement from Lenin and world revolution to Gorbachev and the end of world communism.

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A Documentary History of Communism in Russia

From Lenin to Gorbachev

Edited by Robert V. Daniels

University Press of New England, 2001

An extensive revision of the valued but unobtainable 1960 edition. Nearly 300 key documents are now readily available in translation.

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A Life for Belarus

The Fall and Postmortal Rise of the USSR

Stanislau Shushkevich

Central European University Press, 2025

This memoir of the first president of an independent Belarus (1991-1994) tells about the revival of independent Belarus, the difficulties in establishing a democracy and a market economy, a hardened Soviet mentality, and the political immaturity of the intelligentsia and obduracy of the old nomenklatura.

Stanislau Shushkevich, born in 1934, narrates his path from a son of an “enemy of the people” to a doctorate in physics, and then to be the first head of independent Belarus. A series of entertaining essays discuss some major events as well as some minor ones that are barely known. The book describes Shushkevich’s role in hosting the Belavezha Accords, which brought about the end of the Soviet Union, and explores the motivation behind the decision for the de jure dissolution of the empire at a time when the major world leaders were categorically against the division of the USSR into independent states. The author draws particular attention to the role of the Baltic States in the late perestroika period. He also addresses the political passivity of the Soviet intelligentsia and the reasons for the revival of the Soviet Union in Russia and Belarus.

Shushkevich, who lives in Minsk, also provides valuable insights into contemporary Belarus, including an assessment of Lukashenka’s controversial role in recent events.

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A People's History of the Russian Revolution

Neil Faulkner

Pluto Press, 2017

The Russian Revolution may be the most misunderstood and misrepresented event in modern history, its history told in a mix of legends and anecdotes. In A People's History of the Russian Revolution, Neil Faulkner sets out to debunk the myths and pry fact from fiction, putting at the heart of the story the Russian people who are the true heroes of this tumultuous tale. In this fast-paced introduction, Faulkner tells the powerful narrative of how millions of people came together in a mass movement, organized democratic assemblies, mobilized for militant action, and overturned a vast regime of landlords, profiteers, and warmongers.

Faulkner rejects caricatures of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as authoritarian conspirators or the progenitors of Stalinist dictatorship, and forcefully argues that the Russian Revolution was an explosion of democracy and creativity—and that it was crushed by bloody counter-revolution and replaced with a form of bureaucratic state-capitalism.

Grounded by powerful first-hand testimony, this history marks the centenary of the Revolution by restoring the democratic essence of the revolution, offering a perfect primer for the modern reader.

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A Radical History of the World

Neil Faulkner

Pluto Press, 2018

“Staggeringly ambitious.”―New Internationalist

“One of the finest historians on the left.”—John Newsinger, author, The Blood Never Dried

Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Neil Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives the transformative events of our many histories. This is a history of power, abuse, and greed, but also one of liberation, progress, and solidarity.

From the hunter-gatherers two million years ago to the ancient empires of Persia and China, and from the Russian Revolution to modern imperialism, humans have always struggled to create a better society than what came before. All over the world at numerous points in the past, a different way of life has become an absolute necessity, over and over again. This is a history of the humans in these struggles—the hominid and the hunter, the emperor and the slave, the dictator and the revolutionary.

Reading against the grain of mainstream histories, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past has never been predetermined. From antiquity to feudalism, and from fascism to our precarious political present, choices have always been numerous and complex, and the possible outcomes have ranged broadly between liberation and barbarism. His chapters include:

*Hunters and Farmers
*The First Class Societies
*Ancient Empires
*The Medieval World
*European Feudalism
*The First Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions
*Absolutist Europe and Capitalist Globalization
*The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
*The Revolutionary Wave
*The Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism
*World War and Cold War
*The New World Disorder
*Capitalism’s Greatest Crisis? The Early Twenty-First Century

In our fraught political present—as we face the loss of civil liberties and environmental protections, the rise of ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of nuclear war—we need the perspective of these histories now more than ever. The lesson of A Radical History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.

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A Red Family

Junius, Gladys, and Barbara Scales

Mickey Friedman. Afterword by Barbara Scales. Historical Essay by Gail O'Brien.

University of Illinois Press, 2008

One of the few publicly known communists in the South, Junius Scales organized textile workers, fought segregation, and was the only American to be imprisoned under the membership clause of the Smith Act during the McCarthy years. This compact collective memoir, built on three interconnected oral histories and including a historical essay by Gail O'Brien, covers Scales's organizing activities and work against racism in the South, his progressive disillusionment with Party bureaucracy and dogmatic rigidity, his persecution and imprisonment, as well as his family's radicalism and response to FBI hounding and blacklisting.

Through the distinct perspectives of Junius, his wife Gladys, and his daughter Barbara, this book deepens and personalizes the story of American radicalism. Conversational, intimate, and exceptionally accessible, A Red Family offers a unique look at the American communist experience from the inside out.

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A Social Ecology of Capital

Éric Pineault

Pluto Press, 2022

An original theory of contemporary capitalist growth and its socio-ecological contradictions

Capital is pushing into motion ever larger global material flows. In doing so it has come to depend on massive expenditures of energy, putting to work fossil fuels and the machines they animate to transform the world, accumulate power and grow the economy. The ecological relations and crises of today’s societies are driven by the processes of extraction of the elements that come together as a throughput of material and energy flows controlled by capital and shaped by its imperative of valorization.

In A Social Ecology of Capital, Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century.

Drawing on ecological economics and critical political economy, the book analyses how the social structures of accumulation, production, consumption and waste determine and regulate the material flow and the accumulation of material artifacts. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, the book highlights the contradictions humanity now faces.

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A Social Laboratory for Modern France

The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State

Janet R. Horne

Duke University Press, 2001

As a nineteenth-century think tank that sought answers to France’s pressing “social question,” the Musée Social reached across political lines to forge a reformist alliance founded on an optimistic faith in social science. In A Social Laboratory for Modern France Janet R. Horne presents the story of this institution, offering a nuanced explanation of how, despite centuries of deep ideological division, the French came to agree on the basic premises of their welfare state.
Horne explains how Musée founders believed—and convinced others to believe—that the Third Republic would carry out the social mission of the French Revolution and create a new social contract for modern France, one based on the rights of citizenship and that assumed collective responsibility for the victims of social change. Challenging the persistent notion of the Third Republic as the stagnant backwater of European social reform, Horne instead depicts the intellectually sophisticated and progressive political culture of a generation that laid the groundwork for the rise of a hybrid welfare system, characterized by a partnership between private agencies and government. With a focus on the cultural origins of turn-of-the-century thought—including religion, republicanism, liberalism, solidarism, and early sociology—A Social Laboratory for Modern France demonstrates how French reformers grappled with social problems that are still of the utmost relevance today and how they initiated a process that gave the welfare state the task of achieving social cohesion within an industrializing republic.

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A Socialist History of the French Revolution

Jean Jaurés

Pluto Press, 2021

One of the most influential accounts of the French Revolution ever published, now available for the first time in paperback.

Jean Jaurès was the celebrated French Socialist Party leader, assassinated in 1914 for trying to use diplomacy and industrial action to prevent the outbreak of war. Published just a few years before his death, his magisterial A Socialist History of the French Revolution has endured for over a century.

Written in the midst of his activities as leader of the Socialist Party and editor of its newspaper, L'Humanite, Jaurès intended the book to serve as both a guide and an inspiration to political activity; even now it can serve to do just that.

Jaurès's verve, originality, and willingness to criticize all players in this epic drama make this a truly moving addition to the shelf of great books on the French Revolution. Mitchell Abidor's abridged translation of Jaurès's original six volumes makes this exceptional work truly accessible to an Anglophone audience.

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A Tale of Two Villages

Coerced Modernization in the East European Countryside

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Central European University Press, 2010

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceausescu's birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union.

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Aesthetics and Marxism

Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries

Kang Liu

Duke University Press, 2000

Although Chinese Marxism—primarily represented by Maoism—is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism.

Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity.

Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.

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Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century

A Reader of Radical Undercurrents

John Asimakopoulos

Temple University Press, 2018

The problems of capitalism have been studied from Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty. The latter has recently confirmed that the system of capital is deeply bound up in ever-growing inequality without challenging the continuance of that system. Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century presents a diversity of analyses and visions opposed to the idea that capital should have yet another century to govern human and non-human resources in the interest of profit and accumulation. The editors and contributors to this timely volume present alternatives to the whole liberal litany of administered economies, tax policy recommendations, and half-measures. They undermine and reject the logic of capital, and the foregone conclusion that the twenty-first century should be given over to capital just as the previous two centuries were.

Providing a deep critique of capitalism, based on assessment from a wide range of cultural, social, political, and ecological thinking, Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century insists that transformative, revolutionary, and abolitionist responses to capital are even more necessary in the twenty-first century than they ever were.

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Against Their Will

The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR

Pavel Polian

Central European University Press, 2003

During his reign, Joseph Stalin oversaw the forced resettlement of people by the millions – a maniacal passion that he used for social engineering. The Soviets were not the first to thrust resettlement on its population – a major characteristic of totalitarian systems – but in terms of sheer numbers, technologies used to deport people and the lawlessness which accompanied it, Stalin’s process was the most notable. Six million people of different social, ethnic, and professions were resettled before Stalin's death. Even today, the aftermath of such deportations largely predetermines events which take place in the northern Caucasus, Crimea, the Baltic republics, Moldavia, and western Ukraine. Polian's volume is the first attempt to comprehensively examine the history of forced and semi-voluntary population movements within or organized by the Soviet Union. Contents range from the early 1920s to the rehabilitation of repressed nationalities in the 1990s, dealing with internal (kulaks, ethnic and political deportations) and international forced migrations (German internees and occupied territories). An abundance of facts, figures, tables, maps, and an exhaustively-detailed annex will serve as important sources for further researches.

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Althusser, The Infinite Farewell

Emilio de Ipola

Duke University Press, 2018

In Althusser, The Infinite Farewell—originally published in Spanish and appearing here in English for the first time—Emilio de Ípola contends that Althusser’s oeuvre is divided between two fundamentally different and at times contradictory projects. The first is the familiar Althusser, that of For Marx and Reading Capital. Symptomatically reading these canonical texts alongside Althusser’s lesser-known writings, de Ípola reveals a second, subterranean current of thought that flows throughout Althusser’s classic formulations and which only gains explicit expression in his later works. This subterranean current leads Althusser to move toward an aleatory materialism, or a materialism of the encounter. By explicating this key aspect of Althusser’s theoretical practice, de Ípola revitalizes classic debates concerning major theoretico-political topics, including the relationship between Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis; the difference between ideology, philosophy, and science; and the role of contingency and subjectivity in political encounters and social transformation. In so doing, he underscores Althusser’s continuing importance to political theory and Marxist and post-Marxist thought.

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An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative

The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North

Liudmila Novikova, Translated by Seth Bernstein

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support.

Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the north as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious "people's war" until remaining White forces under General Yevgeny Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.

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An Older and More Beautiful Belgrade

A Visual Chronicle of the Milo.evic Era

Mileta Prodanovic

Central European University Press, 2023

This substantial essay depicts urban collapse in an exceptionally difficult period of the Serbian capital. The author has marshalled facts, reflections, photographs and other imagesto demonstrate the transformation of Belgrade during the Milošević years. With the theoretical grounding of cultural anthropology, history studies, culture of memory, history of art, and urbanism, Mileta Prodanović considers changes to the built environment and urban landscape in the city in the 1990s. He covers many visual aspects of life with great ingenuity: shopping centers, unregulated construction and “wild” modifications of buildings, new buildings (broadcasting studios, shops, homes) that do not fit the surroundings, bad taste in home furnishings (camp, kitsch), boondoggles such as the international art center, problematic historical markers like the obelisk of the eternal flame, billboards, store displays, electoral propaganda, graffiti, grave-markers and cemetery memorials, coins and paper money, calendars, beer labels, and even religious icons (and more). All this information is provided with some critique and much implied comparison to past standards.

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An Ordinary Life?

The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996

Anna Müller

Ohio University Press, 2024

One woman’s national, political, ethnic, social, and personal identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of Europe, Polish Jews, Communism, activism, and survival during the twentieth century.

Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries—Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her small children.

Born in Łódź in 1918, Lechtman became fascinated with Communism in her early youth. In 1935, to avoid the consequences of her political activism during an increasingly antisemitic and hostile political environment, the family moved to Palestine, where Tonia met her future husband, Sioma. In 1937, the couple traveled to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. After discovering she was pregnant, Lechtman relocated to France while Sioma joined the International Brigades. She spent the Second World War in Europe, traveling with two small children between France, Germany, and Switzerland, at times only miraculously avoiding arrest and being transported east to Nazi camps. After the war, she returned to Poland, where she planned to (re)build Communist Poland. However, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned for six years. In 1971, under pressure from her children, Lechtman emigrated from Poland to Israel, where she died in 1996.

In writing Lechtman’s biography, Anna Müller has consulted a rich collection of primary source material, including archival documentation, private documents and photographs, interviews from different periods of Lechtman’s life, and personal correspondence. Despite this intimacy, Müller also acknowledges key historiographical questions arising from the lacunae of lost materials, the selective preservation of others, and her own interpretive work translating a life into a life story.

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Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900-1935

By John Dulles

University of Texas Press, 1973

In providing a detailed account of the leftist opposition and its bloody repression in Brazil during the Old Republic and the early years of the Vargas regime, John W. F. Dulles gives considerable attention to the labor movement, generally neglected by historians. This study focuses on the formation and activities of anarchists and Communists, the two most important radical groups working within Brazilian labor. Relying on a wide variety of sources, including interviews and personal papers, Dulles supplies information that for the most part is unavailable in English and not easily accessible in Portuguese.

The struggles of Brazilian workers—usually against an alliance of company owners, state and federal troops, and state and federal governments—suffered reverses in 1920 and 1921. These setbacks were cited by Astrogildo Pereira and other admirers of Bolshevism as reasons for the proletariat to forsake anarchism and adhere to the Communist Party, Brazilian Section of the Communist International.

Anarchists and Communists, struggling against each other in the labor unions in the mid 1920’s, joined opposition journalists and politicians in supporting military rebels in a romantic uprising marked by adventure and suffering, jailbreaks and long marches, and death in the backlands.

Slowly, Brazilian Communism gained strength during the latter part of the 1920’s, but 1930 brought the beginnings of failure. Worse for the Party than the government crackdown and the Trotskyite dissidence was the growing attraction of the Aliança Liberal, the oppositionist political movement that brought Getúlio Vargas to power. While workers and Party members flocked to the Aliança in defiance of Party orders, sectarian edicts from Moscow resulted in the expulsion or demotion of the Party’s former leaders and in the condemnation of intellectuals.

Luís Carlos Prestes, “the Cavalier of Hope” who had led the military rebels in the mid-1920’s, turned to Communism—only to find himself not welcome in the Party. Taken to Russia by the Communist International in 1931, he was finally accepted into the Brazilian Party in absentia in 1934. Later that year, misled in Moscow by optimistic reports brought by Brazilian Communists, he agreed to lead a rebellion in Brazil. That decision and its consequences in 1935 were disastrous to Brazilian Communism.

The struggles among anarchists, Stalinists, and Trotskyites in Brazil were reflections of a worldwide struggle. This study discloses and assesses the effects of Moscow policy changes on Communism in Brazil and contributes to an understanding of Moscow’s policies throughout Latin America during this period.

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