With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed that communism had been confined to, in Trotsky’s words, the dustbin of history. Instead, there has been a surprising resurgence. Despite gestures in the direction of reform, Communist China has returned to a more explicit, expansive, and authoritarian Marxism. In the West, intellectuals, politicians, and the students who follow them have found new rationales for censorship, central planning, and even political violence, embracing what New York’s mayor calls the “warmth of collectivism.” The USSR and its fully planned economy may be defunct, but the creed of the commissar—the desire of statist politicians to control and direct us, and terrorize dissenters into compliance—lives on. We underestimate its appeal at our peril.

Dr. Sean McMeekin is a professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, teaching courses in modern European, Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history. He has also taught at Koç University in Istanbul, Yale, Bilkent in Ankara, and NYU. He is the author of Stalin’s War (2021); The Russian Revolution (2017); The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2015, awarded the Arthur Goodzeit Book Prize); July 1914: Countdown to War (2013, reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review); The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011, winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize); The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010, winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize); History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (2008); The Red Millionaire (2004); and numerous articles and essays. McMeekin also reviews books regularly for the Sunday Times, The Literary Review, American Historical Review, History Today, Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and Journal of Cold War Studies.