The establishment of the Bolshevik communist totalitarian regime in Russia in 1917 was facilitated by the existing institutional genes necessary for totalitarian rule, including the autocratic Tsarist system, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the secretive political organizations. Chapter 7 studies the origins and evolution of these institutional genes and it also examines their role in the failure of the Russian constitutional reforms and the genesis of communist totalitarian ideology and organization in Russia.

Chapter 10 investigates the establishment and growth of China’s Bolshevik Party, the core element in the communist totalitarian revolution and regime, that was orchestrated by the Comintern. The chapter commences with an examination of the inception and operational dynamics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a Comintern offshoot. It also addresses the reorganization of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the formation of the CCP-KMT alliance as key strategies implemented by the Comintern to bolster the fledgling CCP.

The narrative underscores the essential role the Chinese secret societies played in the development of the CCP’s organizational and military forces, following the directives of the Comintern and their implementation in practice. Additionally, the chapter examines the introduction of totalitarian rules within the CCP and its military branches, which fostered a reign of terror and enabled the rise of a totalitarian leader. It traces the initial establishment of a totalitarian institutional structure within the CCP and assesses the Comintern’s decisive role in fortifying the CCP’s ultimate leadership, suggesting its profound and lasting impacts on the Chinese political landscape.

Building on the institutional genes of the Tsarist autocracy, the Russian Orthodox Church and the secret political societies analyzed in the previous chapter, this chapter explores the origins of the Bolshevik Party, which was the first communist totalitarian party. It analyzes the Bolsheviks’ transformation from a secretive organization to a ruling totalitarian party characterized by a personality cult and Red Terror. The chapter then outlines the institutional prerequisites for the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, noting the absence of constitutional backing for the Provisional Government and the appropriation of power under the guise of Soviet authority. Furthermore, the chapter details the consolidation of a comprehensive totalitarian system, including the suppression of opposition through dictatorship of the proletariat, the application of Red Terror tactics, the establishment of total state ownership, and the role of the Comintern in initiating communist totalitarian revolutions internationally, all of which were prerequisites for the creation of the Chinese communist totalitarian regime.

This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

Previous historians have acknowledged the existence of paid domestic labor in the Soviet Union, but their work always proceeded from the assumption that domestic service was something illicit. This book shows that domestic service not only remained legal under Soviet law, its existence was openly discussed and even considered essential for the Soviet economy. Yet, the compatibility of domestic service with the Bolsheviks’ egalitarian message remained a contested issue. Critics of domestic service argued on Marxist grounds that it was an “unproductive employment” of workers. Proponents of paid domestic labor emphasized the domestic workers’ contribution to the building of socialism because this labor freed the still more valuable labor of their employers. Throughout the seven decades of the Soviet Union, the question of paid domestic labor came up time and again, but its contradictions could not be resolved. Bolsheviks’ sincere desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism came into conflict with their gendered vision of society where housework was women’s work.

This chapter sets out the dystopian critique of the liberal democratic state that emerged when neoclassical economic reasoning was applied to the political realm. The resulting ‘public choice theory’ made assertive claims of democratic state failure that became a mainstay of neoliberal argument, but here they are shown to possess clear affinities with the Leninist account of bureaucracy as the ‘real’ centre of power in a bourgeois democracy. It follows from the deterministic, closed-system reasoning in both Leninist and neoclassical 'public choice' theory that these affinities continued into the respective prescriptions for the preferred constitutional order. The ideal constitution of limited government set out in public choice theory, most notably by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Geoffrey Brennan is shown to be a logically inevitable counterpart to the ‘withering away of the state’ under socialism anticipated by Lenin. The adjacent constitutional arguments of Friedrich August von Hayek are also considered, as is the more empirically robust account of bureuacracy as an essential feature of modernity set out by Max Weber.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

The German army viewed war as the realm of constant uncertainty. Reducing this was the third command task, principally through intelligence on the enemy and information on German troops (Chapter 6). By 1917, loss of the initiative and the need to deploy scarce resources efficiently had boosted German military intelligence’s importance. Its dense network of sources. Poor integration and frequent squabbles between intelligence producers, but also effective informal co-operation, including extensive use of civilians. The tiny Intelligence Department in OHL (Supreme Army Command) produced all-source assessments used extensively by decision-makers, but performance on total war political and economic requirements was inadequate despite recruitment of high-level agents.

Case study of German intelligence’s mixed performance in spring 1917. Good intelligence played a central role in the German victory over the French assault by enabling timely concentration of forces; but uncertainty about British plans was a major factor in delaying defensive preparations, leading to the initial defeat at Arras.

In July 1914, Vladimir Lenin and his comrade Gregory Zinoviev found themselves as political émigrés “in a god-forsaken little mountain village in Galicia.” Under gathering clouds of war, Zinoviev recalls making a bet with Lenin that the German Social Democratic Party would never support financing a war. Lenin gladly took up this wager in full confidence that European socialist parties, as declared by the Second International, would call for a general strike of the proletariat in the event of war. As Zinoviev recalls, Lenin observed that “no, they [German Socialist Party or SPD ] are not such scoundrels as all that. They will not, of course, fight the war, but they will, to ease their conscience, vote against the credits lest the working class revolts against them.”

Tolstoy’s life and works have been interpreted in myriad ways in India. His emergence in the South Asian literary scene coincided with an important moment in the development of anti-colonial resistance to British imperial rule. In this moment, competing strands of ideological influence sought to interpret and introduce Tolstoy to the Indian reading public in their own way. This chapter studies two major streams into which these interpretations can be divided – the well-known one of Tolstoy as a pacifist, religiously based intellectual by Mohandas Gandhi, and the lesser-known, radical interpretation of Tolstoy as a figure of active resistance to issues ranging from landlordism to patriarchal oppression. The chapter investigates how the image of Tolstoy moved seamlessly between different cultural and linguistic entities across the region, providing insights into the category of “Indian literature” itself.

Russia is the world’s largest country by landmass, covering an area of 17 million square kilometres. Canada, the world’s second-largest country, is less than 10 million square kilometres in size. At the beginning of 2022, before the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow, Russia’s capital, was home to more billionaires than any other city on earth. Yet Russians are relatively poor compared with their western and eastern neighbours. The GDP per capita of Russians is only half that of Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, and less than a quarter of that of Japan, its easternmost neighbour. Why is it that the average Russian has lagged behind, despite the nation’s apparent opulence?

The answer lies in the country’s economic institutions. By the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was already a poor country relative to its neighbours. It had only abolished serfdom in 1861.

Kant and Schiller each take up one side of Rousseau so as to heal the rift between nature and freedom: Kant stressing our capacity to repress our natural passions, Schiller stressing Rousseau’s Romanticism and the harmony of freedom and sentiment in aesthetic education. Yet the free self and the natural self remained divided within each individual. Hegel healed this division through a synthesis of Kantian moral rigor and Schillerian love of beauty in which the concept of human nature was jettisoned altogether in favor of a totally historicized understanding of human existence. Hegel also resolved the Rousseauan conflict between our lost natural happiness and the alienating qualities of civilization by relocating Rousseau’s Golden Age of the remote past to the final outcome of civilizational progress, redeeming its alienating aspects as necessary for our fulfillment today. Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit includes his understanding of the ancient Greek polis, his critique of the Rousseau-inspired Jacobin Terror, his defense of passionate political ambition against Kantian moral purity, and his claim to have reconciled reason and revelation as the “self-actualization of God” as history. Hegel’s account of historical progress ignited an intense debate among his successors.

Chapter 18 analyses how the principal western policy- and decision-makers of 1919 sought to deal with the Bolshevik challenge or, more precisely, the political challenge posed by Lenin’s regime and the political and ideological challenge posed by what they regarded as the threat of a transnational spread of Bolshevism across and beyond Europe. It also reassesses the overall significance of the Bolshevik threat for the making of the nascent Atlantic order after the First World War, underscoring that it affected the peacemaking process but was not as decisive as generations of cold war historians have claimed and highlighting that this process was by no means shaped by a struggle between Wilsonianism and Leninism. It then examines how Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks interpreted the western powers’ pursuits and sought to expand the communist revolution westwards, also through the Communist International. And, finally, it illuminates how difficult it proved for Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and their advisers to agree on a common approach both towards the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik regime – and how they eventually concentrated on isolating it and preventing a German-Bolshevik alliance, ensuring that subsequently the Soviet Union would remain outside the nascent Atlantic system.

One of the individuals Mailer most frequently cited as an influence was writer and Marxist intellectual Jean Malaquais, who he met just after publishing The Naked and the Dead. Malaquais’ influence is perhaps most evident in Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore (which, somewhat ironically, Malaquais himself did not care for). As the years went on, Malaquais’ influence waned as Mailer’s own philosophies began to diverge from those of his mentor, though the two remained close, with the exception of a falling out in the 1990s. In fact, in his preface to Malaquais’ novel The Joker, Mailer also wrote that the author “had more influence upon my mind than anyone I ever knew.”

Scholars of Wallace Stevens have variously represented him as a crafter of poetic utopias, a skeptic of utopian thinking, and a champion of utopian material sufficiency. Mao’s chapter adds to the picture by showing how, in his poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens situates leaders and movements impelled by visions of ideal futures within a conception of political life as an ongoing struggle for dominance between ideas. Reading texts such as “Owl’s Clover,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” in relation to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons, the chapter shows that Stevens’s view of history as an interplay of imagination and reality partook of important currents in interwar intellectual life.

Marginalia in Brecht’s own copies of Unter dem Banner des Marxismus create a picture of his studies, between 1927 and 1934, in response to Lenin's call, issued in 1922, for a study of Hegelian dialectics "from a materialist standpoint." Taken together with their marginalia and the primary sources they cite, the articles by W. Adoratski, A. Deborin, and Wilhelm Reich published between 1925 and 1930 characterize the environment in which Brecht developed his understanding of dialectics and his aesthetics of epic theater.The intellectual underpinnings of this aesthetics, this chapter suggests, entail at least three concepts that are useful for epic theater’s anti-illusionist purposes: cause and effect (and its reversal) in history, including theater history; the relation of art (a material product of the “thinking brain”) to reality ("Art follows [reflects, contradicts] reality" – Brecht); and the dynamic in untenable antagonisms that, once recognized, portends their resolution (class struggle). Following Brecht’s close reading of these distinctions may help clarify the place in Brecht's theater of “militant materialism” and Lenin’s reflection theory of knowledge.

This essay outlines Brecht’s relation to Marxism along three dimensions. First, it examines his Marxist influences including Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Karl Korsch, and Fritz Sternberg. Second, it explores Marxist reactions to him, particularly those of GeorgLukács and Theodor Adorno. Lastly, it investigates his influences on Marxist thought vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Rancière, and others. It shows that not only was his work heavily influenced by the movement, his thought also occupies an often-unrecognized central position within it.

Greater inter-allied collaboration spurred by Caporetto did not iron out all the differences between the Allies. They re-emerged during the formulation and implementation of Allied grand strategy for 1918 and in the early peace-planning talks that occurred in parallel in Allied countries.

The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 caused the United States to sever relations with Germany, though President Wilson held out hope for peace until learning that the German foreign secretary, Zimmermann, sought to turn Mexico against the US and use it as an intermediary to turn Japan against the Allies. Amid these tensions Nicholas II was overthrown and succeeded by a Provisional Government, ultimately led by Kerensky, which made the fateful decision to keep Russia in the war. In April 1917, days after the United States declared war, Germany gave Lenin transportation home from Switzerland, hoping he would foment a second revolution and knock Russia out of the war. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, Lenin indeed concluded an armistice with the Central Powers, but only after his appeal for a general peace “without annexations or indemnities” failed. The net result of the United States replacing tsarist Russia gave the Allies an ideological cohesion they had lacked previously. While Wilson characterized their war as a fight for universal rights and freedoms, the entry of the United States gave them millions of fresh troops to go with the capital, munitions, and supplies they were already receiving from American sources.

This chapter examines planned revolutions, which emerge from deliberately organized and orchestrated rebellions. Planned revolutions contain several key, interrelated elements. First, regardless of their declared ideological beliefs, all self-declared revolutionaries are essentially nationalist. Two other, related elements characteristic of planned revolutions are those of leadership and the party. Planned revolutions will not appear unless several highly dedicated individuals commit themselves to planning, organizing, and leading a takeover of power. Sooner or later, the cabal gives rise to a political party or a guerrilla organization whose chief, often only, mission is to lead a revolution. The party sees itself as the revolution’s vanguard. Among the planners involved in this vanguard, usually an individual with greater ambitions, or better organizational skills and opportunities, or through sheer chance, emerges as its leader. While planned revolutions cannot succeed without the work of an organized revolutionary party, the party’s leader becomes the face of the revolution, and, if the revolution succeeds, he then becomes the leader of the country. The October 1917 Russian revolution, and the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions belong in this category. As starkly evident by Che Guevara’s failed movement in Bolivia, not all attempts at revolutionary capture of power succeed.