The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin

Communism has decisively shaped the modern world. After the Second   World War, Marxist regimes ruled over one-third of the population of the  globe.  Even today, after the fall of the Soviet Union, communist ideas  continue to steer  current events in Eastern Europe and East Asia.

According  to award-winning historian Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius  of the  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to understand the inner dynamics of   communist thought and rule (and the reasons they linger in places like  Cuba,  North Korea, and China), you have to go back to the crucial  beginnings of  communism. How did it become such a pervasive economic  and political philosophy?  Why, of all places, did it first take root in  early 20th-century  Russia?

These and other questions all get  addressed as part of a  fascinating story that stretches from the  intellectual partnership between Karl  Marx and Friedrich Engels in the  late 19th century to the Russian  Revolution of 1917 to the death of  Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It's a story whose  drama, Professor Liulevicius  notes, “has few equals in terms of sheer scale,  scope, or suffering.”