100 Fun Facts About Communism

What does the name of Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's daily founded in 1912, mean in English?

Truth was the name, while the government paper Izvestia meant 'the news', which gave Soviet readers a joke: there is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia.

What does 'Bolshevik', the name of Lenin's faction from 1903, literally mean?

Majority, from the Russian bolshinstvo, was the label Lenin's side took after winning key votes at a 1903 party congress, leaving Julius Martov's rivals branded Mensheviks, the 'minority', for the rest of their history.

The Communist Manifesto's first section calls all recorded history the history of what?

Class struggles, in the first chapter's opening line, make up 'the history of all hitherto existing society'; in 1888 Engels added a footnote narrowing that to written history, since the earlier past was all but unknown in 1847.

May Day, 1 May, marks 1886 eight-hour-day strikes that climaxed days later in the Haymarket affair in which US city?

Chicago's Haymarket affair of 4 May 1886, when a bomb was thrown at police breaking up a labour rally, capped a strike wave that began on 1 May; in 1889 the Second International adopted that date for worldwide demonstrations.

The alias Joseph Stalin used from 1912 derives from the Russian word for which material?

Steel, or stal in Russian, gave Ioseb Jughashvili the alias usually rendered 'Man of Steel'; before that he had gone by Koba, a name borrowed from the bandit hero of a Georgian novel.

Which state dropped communism from its constitution in 2009 while writing in its 'military first' policy?

North Korea's 2009 amendment dropped the word entirely and named Songun, the 'military first' policy, as a guide alongside Juche; Marxism-Leninism had already gone from the text in 1992.

Who was enshrined as his country's 'eternal President' by a 1998 constitutional preamble?

Kim Il Sung was never replaced as president: the 1998 amendment, which named the text the 'Kim Il-sung Constitution', abolished the office four years after his death, so his son led under other titles.

Which Soviet leader told the 1961 Party Congress the USSR would reach communism by 1980?

Nikita Khrushchev's new party programme promised to build communism in 20 years, and the same congress voted to move Stalin's remains out of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square.

Warren Beatty won the Best Director Oscar for which 1981 epic about the journalist John Reed?

Reds follows John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and Beatty co-wrote, produced, directed and starred, though the film lost Best Picture to Chariots of Fire.

Which 2006 German drama about a Stasi officer spying in East Berlin won the foreign-language Oscar?

The Lives of Others opens in Hohenschönhausen prison but could not be filmed there, because the director of the memorial on the site refused permission. It was its writer-director's first feature.

Which 1939 comedy, sold with the tagline 'Garbo Laughs!', casts Greta Garbo as a Soviet envoy?

Ninotchka was Garbo's first comedy and her penultimate film, and it was banned in the Soviet Union and its satellites for poking fun at Moscow's commissars.

On the hammer and sickle, made the official Soviet emblem in July 1923, the sickle stands for whom?

The peasantry's sickle was paired with the industrial worker's hammer in a design Yevgeny Kamzolkin first drew in 1918 as a May Day decoration, five years before it became official.

Eugène Pottier meant his 1871 lyrics for The Internationale to be sung to which anthem's tune?

La Marseillaise was the tune Pottier, a Commune veteran, had in mind; the melody sung today was composed only in 1888 by Pierre De Geyter for a workers' choir in Lille.

What name was given to the screenwriters and directors cited for contempt after defying HUAC in 1947?

The Hollywood Ten included Dalton Trumbo, who went on writing under other names until Otto Preminger publicly announced him as screenwriter of Exodus in 1960, breaking the blacklist.

Which activist was Gus Hall's running mate on the Communist Party USA ticket in 1980 and 1984?

Angela Davis, a decade after J. Edgar Hoover had put her on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, ran twice on the party ticket before leaving the CPUSA in 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved.

Which rival doctrine, made Soviet state policy in 1926, opposed the theory of 'permanent revolution'?

Socialism in one country reversed Stalin's own line: earlier in 1924 he had written that one country's efforts were not enough, and the new doctrine became state policy after his January 1926 article On the Issues of Leninism.

Which Southeast Asian kingdom fell in December 1975 to its People's Revolutionary Party?

Laos became the Lao People's Democratic Republic when a congress dissolved the kingdom on 2 December 1975, after the king was pressed to abdicate; the party that took over now cites 'Kaysone Phomvihane Thought'.

Which country's People's Republic, proclaimed in 1924, spent nearly seven decades as a Soviet satellite?

Mongolia's revolutionaries took power in 1921 with Red Army support and proclaimed the People's Republic three years later; it stayed in Moscow's orbit longer than any other satellite.

What term, literally 'self-publishing', named the banned writings hand-copied across the Soviet bloc?

Samizdat texts were typed onto carbon or tissue paper in several copies at once, because photocopiers were tightly controlled; tamizdat, by contrast, meant works smuggled out and printed abroad.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht's league, which became Germany's Communist Party in 1918, was named after whom?

Spartacus, who led a slave revolt against Rome, lent his name to a group begun in 1914 by SPD members who opposed the war; two weeks after it became the Communist Party, Freikorps troops murdered both founders.

In which city was The Communist Manifesto first printed, as a 23-page German pamphlet, in 1848?

London's Communist Workers' Educational Association printed the pamphlet anonymously at 46 Liverpool Street in the City, the year before Marx himself settled in the capital for good.

Which Indian state voted in the country's first communist government, led by E. M. S. Namboodiripad?

Kerala gave the Communist Party of India 60 of 126 seats in its first assembly election, and Namboodiripad took office in April 1957, only for Nehru's central government to dismiss his ministry in 1959 after mass protests.

Jim Connell's 1889 socialist anthem 'The Red Flag' is usually sung to the tune of which carol?

O Tannenbaum carries the words Connell wanted set to the Jacobite air 'The White Cockade', and the song still closes Labour Party conferences in Britain.

Which Welsh mill owner bought an Indiana town in 1825 to found New Harmony?

Robert Owen sank most of his fortune into the settlement on the Wabash River, but his model community lasted only about two years, and he went home to Britain.

Which 1649 English group, also called True Levellers, farmed the common land at St George's Hill?

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, alarmed the Council of State with their communal farming near Weybridge, a site that is now one of England's most exclusive private estates.

Which leader dotted his Balkan country with bunkers, 5.7 per square kilometre, between 1967 and 1986?

Enver Hoxha's bunkers were never used for their intended purpose in his lifetime, and today many serve as cafés, storehouses and animal shelters across the Albanian countryside.

Which capital's Palace of the Parliament, begun under Ceaușescu in 1984, is Earth's heaviest building?

Bucharest's palace swallowed a million cubic metres of marble, and the hilltop Uranus quarter was levelled to make room for it; Anca Petrescu led its team of architects.

Which city hosted the founding congress of the Second International in 1889?

Paris opened the congress on 14 July 1889, a century to the day after the storming of the Bastille, while the city's world fair showed off the new Eiffel Tower.

Which playwright led Civic Forum in 1989 and went on to be Czechoslovakia's last president?

Václav Havel had co-written the Charter 77 manifesto partly in protest at the jailing of the psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, then served as the Czech Republic's first president until 2003.

Which East German car, built in Zwickau with duroplast panels, could have a 13-year waiting list?

Trabant bodies used a hard plastic made from recycled Soviet cotton waste and dye-industry resins, and the little cars became the image of 1989 as East Germans drove them across the opened border.

Which body, founded in 1919, did Stalin dissolve in 1943 as a gesture to his allies?

The Comintern, short for Communist International, was wound up in May 1943, 24 years after its founding in Moscow; a successor of sorts, the Cominform, followed in 1947.

Whose 1933 Rockefeller Center fresco was destroyed after he refused to paint out a portrait of Lenin?

Diego Rivera repainted the lost Man at the Crossroads from photographs in Mexico City, at a smaller scale, under the new title Man, Controller of the Universe.

Which singer did Gennadi Gerasimov name Moscow's 1989 hands-off doctrine for the Warsaw Pact after?

Frank Sinatra's 'My Way' gave Gerasimov his line in Helsinki on 25 October 1989: 'So every country decides on its own which road to take', burying the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine.

Which artist, a Communist Party member, drew the dove on the 1949 World Peace Congress poster?

Pablo Picasso's lithograph became the congress emblem, and the day before it opened his partner Françoise Gilot gave birth to a daughter they named Paloma, Spanish for dove.

Which economic policy, generalised from 1950, set Tito's Yugoslavia apart from Soviet-style planning?

Workers' self-management handed factories to councils of their own employees, a system Tito's regime generalised from 1950 after refusing to bow to Moscow, and Yugoslavia never fully joined Comecon.

Which country's union-led opposition won 99 of 100 Senate seats in a partly free June 1989 election?

Poland's Solidarity also took every one of the 161 Sejm seats it was allowed to contest, and by August Tadeusz Mazowiecki was the country's first non-communist prime minister since 1946.

In which British colony did Ho Chi Minh unite three factions into Vietnam's Communist Party in 1930?

Hong Kong's Kowloon district hosted the founding meeting in February 1930; that October, on Moscow's instructions, the new party was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party to reflect a wider regional mission.

Which Hungarian leader, in power from 1956 to 1988, presided over so-called 'goulash communism'?

János Kádár's consumer-minded liberalisation earned his country the 1970s nickname 'the happiest barracks' in the Soviet camp, and his 1968 New Economic Mechanism loosened central planning.

What was the first book Marx and Engels wrote together, an 1845 attack on the Young Hegelians?

The Holy Family took its title, a sarcastic jab at the Bauer brothers and their circle, from the publisher; Engels finished his few chapters before leaving France, and Marx wrote the larger share by the end of November 1844.

What Soviet term named both the party's list of key posts and the privileged elite approved to fill them?

Nomenklatura comes through Russian from the Latin nomenclatura, a list of names, and the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called the people on those lists a 'new class' that had supplanted the old capitalist elite.

Which 1970s current did Spain's Communist leader Santiago Carrillo champion in a 1977 book and a Madrid summit?

Eurocommunism gave Carrillo's 1977 book its title, Eurocommunism and the State; that year he met Italy's Enrico Berlinguer and France's Georges Marchais in Madrid to set out a line independent of Moscow.

In October 1965, Fidel Castro read out whose farewell letter as Cuba's Communist Party was founded?

Che Guevara's letter resigned his posts and his Cuban citizenship as he left to fight abroad; the new party then waited ten years to hold its first regular congress.

Which novelist, a former Communist Party member, wrote Darkness at Noon, the 1940 story of an Old Bolshevik on trial?

Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest, wrote it in German as Sonnenfinsternis, 'solar eclipse', and the original manuscript was thought lost until a doctoral student found a copy in a Zurich library in 2015.

Which US Attorney General led the 1919-20 raids on suspected radicals with a young J. Edgar Hoover?

A. Mitchell Palmer handed the 24-year-old Hoover a new General Intelligence Division in August 1919, and Hoover organised the later raids that aimed to deport suspected anarchists and communists.

Which portmanteau, once a Soviet party department's short name, now means any highly politicised art?

Agitprop fused 'agitation' and 'propaganda', the two halves of a department attached to every Communist Party committee, before drifting into the vocabulary of theatre and protest art.

Who led the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic in practice during its 133 days from March to August?

Béla Kun, officially only the foreign commissar, ran the republic while Sándor Garbai held the nominal top job; it fell after 133 days when the Romanian army broke through and Kun fled abroad.

Which 1516 Thomas More book describes an island with no private property, its name meaning 'nowhere'?

Utopia fuses the Greek 'ou' (not) and 'topos' (place); on More's island goods sit in warehouses and citizens simply request what they need, an idea communists later claimed as an ancestor.

Which Italian Communist Party founder filled over 30 notebooks in Mussolini's prisons with theory?

Antonio Gramsci filled some 3,000 pages between his 1926 arrest and his release shortly before his death in 1937, arguing that ruling classes hold power through culture as much as force.

Which microstate had a communist-socialist coalition from 1945 until the 1957 'Rovereta affair'?

San Marino's coalition lost control of the council in September 1957, and opposition councillors occupied an abandoned factory at Rovereta to declare a provisional government.

Which of Engels's literary executors was branded a 'revisionist' for urging reform over revolution?

Eduard Bernstein's 'evolutionary socialism' split the movement, pitting him against orthodox Marxists like Karl Kautsky and radicals like Rosa Luxemburg, despite the trust Engels had placed in him.

In an essay written in 1843, Karl Marx famously compared which force in society to opium for the people?

Religion, Marx wrote, was the opium of the people, yet the same passage calls it the heart of a heartless world: a comfort for the oppressed as much as a drug.

Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice axe in 1940 while living in exile in which country?

Mexico gave Trotsky asylum in 1937, after spells in Turkey, France and Norway. He was attacked in his own study by Ramón Mercader, an agent of Stalin's secret police.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, which pig, an allegory of Joseph Stalin, ends up ruling the farm?

Napoleon seizes the farm by setting his dogs on his rival Snowball, the book's stand-in for Leon Trotsky, who is chased into exile and then blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Which revolutionary stares out of 'Guerrillero Heroico', Alberto Korda's much-copied portrait taken in Havana in 1960?

Che Guevara stepped into view at a memorial service for the victims of a freighter explosion, and Korda got just two frames. One art college has called the result the world's most famous photograph.

Nikita Khrushchev is said to have pounded which object on his desk at the UN General Assembly in 1960?

His shoe came out, the story goes, in protest at a Philippine delegate's speech. Eyewitness accounts conflict, and the best-known picture of him waving it is a fake.

Which silent-film star, accused of communist sympathies, had his US re-entry permit revoked in 1952?

Charlie Chaplin had just sailed for a film premiere in Britain when the permit was pulled, and he did not set foot in America again until 1972, when he collected an honorary Oscar.

Joseph Stalin was born in 1878 in the town of Gori, which lies in which present-day country?

Georgia belonged to the Russian Empire when Stalin was born there, and he spent five years training as an Orthodox priest at a seminary in Tiflis before turning to revolution.

Finnish soldiers resisting the 1939 Soviet invasion named their petrol bombs after which Soviet foreign minister?

Vyacheslav Molotov had claimed on Soviet radio that the bombers over Finland were dropping food. The Finns nicknamed the bombs his bread baskets and offered a drink to go with them.

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 opens with the claim that what is 'haunting Europe'?

A spectre, the spectre of communism, opens the pamphlet, which closes with an equally famous call for the workers of the world to unite.

Marx's 1875 formula for communism runs 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his' what?

Needs were the measure Marx kept for communism's final stage. The Soviet Union adapted his formula for the stage it said it had reached, ending it with the word 'work' instead.

In Marxist theory, which class lives by selling its labour for wages rather than by owning businesses or land?

The proletariat borrows its name from ancient Rome's proletarii, citizens so poor that the census listed their children in place of property.

Which critique of political economy did Karl Marx publish in Hamburg in 1867, leaving two further volumes unfinished?

Das Kapital ran to a single volume in Marx's lifetime. Friedrich Engels pieced the second and third together from his friend's manuscripts and published them in 1885 and 1894.

Which Petrograd building, seat of Russia's Provisional Government, did the Bolsheviks seize in the October Revolution?

The Winter Palace was taken after the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot from the harbour as a signal. The ministers inside gave up after only sporadic gunfire through the building.

Lenin's embalmed body has been on public display since 1924 in a mausoleum on which Moscow plaza?

Red Square first held Lenin in a wooden tomb, ready on the day his coffin arrived in January 1924. The permanent stone mausoleum was completed in 1930.

Which Russian acronym for the Soviet agency that ran forced-labour camps became a byword for the camps themselves?

Gulag stands for the Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived eight years inside, made the word known around the world in 1973.

Which Russian word for 'openness' named the Soviet policy of freer speech and information launched in the mid-1980s?

Glasnost cut back the censor's checks on print and broadcasts before they went out, and invited ordinary citizens to scrutinise and criticise their own leaders.

Which Soviet leader, winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, resigned on Christmas Day 1991 as the USSR dissolved?

Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation on television, and that evening the Soviet flag over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolour.

Which barrier, begun in August 1961, did East Germany officially call the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart'?

The Berlin Wall was presented as a shield against fascist plotters in the West, but its real purpose was to stop East Germany's own citizens from fleeing there.

Winston Churchill's 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, popularised which phrase for Europe's Cold War divide?

The Iron Curtain, as Churchill drew it, ran from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. President Truman had come to the college in Fulton to hear him say so.

At which inlet on Cuba's south coast did CIA-backed exiles land in April 1961, hoping to topple Fidel Castro?

Bay of Pigs became a byword for fiasco after the exile brigade was beaten within three days. Cuba later swapped 1,113 prisoners for $53 million in food and medicine.

Which Wisconsin senator claimed in a 1950 speech in Wheeling to hold a list of communists in the State Department?

Joseph McCarthy is usually quoted as claiming 205 names, though he later put the figure at 57. The speech made him a national figure overnight, and four years on the Senate voted to censure him.

Which Cold War idea, voiced by Eisenhower in 1954, held that one country going communist would topple its neighbours?

Domino theory took its name from the picture Eisenhower painted for reporters when asked about Indochina: a row of tiles in which knocking over the first makes the last go over very quickly.

Which shipyard electrician led Poland's Solidarity union and was elected the country's president in 1990?

Lech Wałęsa won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize but sent his wife to collect it, fearing the authorities would not let him back into the country.

Which form of address, 'tovarishch' in Russian, did the Bolsheviks use for workers and party members?

Comrade picked up its political meaning after the French Revolution, when it grew into a form of address between socialists and workers.

Which US vice president argued capitalism against communism with Khrushchev in Moscow's 1959 'Kitchen Debate'?

Richard Nixon and the Soviet premier sparred through interpreters at an American exhibition, where a whole model house had been built to show what a family in the United States could afford.

Which three things did the Bolsheviks' most famous slogan of 1917 promise to war-weary Russians?

Peace, land and bread stood for three concrete pledges: an end to the war, farmland for the people who worked it, and an end to famine.

What do economists call a system like the Soviet Union's, in which state planners, not markets, set output and prices?

A command economy takes its orders from the top. Soviet planners handed output targets down the line, and most of the Eastern Bloc copied the model until it switched to markets.

Which Marxist term covers the factories, tools, mines and raw materials that communism would place in common ownership?

The means of production are what divides the classes in Marx's scheme: one class owns them, and the other has to work for wages because it does not.

What name is given to the Chinese Red Army's retreat of some 10,000 kilometres from Jiangxi to Shaanxi, begun in 1934?

The Long March set out with about 100,000 troops and only some 8,000 survived it, yet it made Mao Zedong: a conference held along the way left him the party's leader in all but name.

Which Chinese leader, twice purged by Mao, opened the country to market reforms after taking power in 1978?

Deng Xiaoping spent four years working in a tractor factory after one purge, and summed up his outlook with a proverb: a cat's colour is beside the point so long as it catches mice.

What does the Russian word 'soviet', the name of the workers' bodies set up in the 1905 revolution, literally mean?

Council is the literal meaning. The soviets began as workers' assemblies, and Lenin's 1917 demand that all power pass to them turned the word into the name of a state.

Which scheme of state-set targets, first launched in 1928, drove the Soviet Union's crash industrialisation?

Five-year plans put heavy industry first, and the state planning committee went on to launch thirteen of them in all.

Which Soviet type of collective farm, run in law as a members' cooperative, existed alongside the state-owned sovkhoz?

Kolkhoz members were paid a share of the harvest and profit according to the days they had worked, whereas a sovkhoz hired its workers on a salary.

Which 1968 reform movement under Alexander Dubček was crushed that August by a Warsaw Pact invasion?

The Prague Spring began when Dubček became party leader that January. Soviet, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops invaded overnight to end it, while East Germany's army was held back at the border.

From which neutral country did Lenin set off in April 1917 on the so-called 'sealed train' across Germany?

Switzerland was Lenin's wartime refuge. Germany waved him and 31 other Russians through, hoping they would cause trouble for its enemy, though the train was never truly sealed.

Lenin was a pseudonym adopted in 1901; under which family name was the Bolshevik leader born in Simbirsk?

Ulyanov is still on the map, because Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. His elder brother Aleksandr was executed in 1887 for joining a plot to kill the tsar.

Friedrich Engels's 1845 book on the English working class drew on his time in the family cotton business in which city?

Manchester was opened up to Engels by Mary Burns, an Irish factory worker who led him through slums that would have been unsafe for a well-off German to enter alone.

What was the common name of the first Soviet secret police, founded in December 1917 under Felix Dzerzhinsky?

The Cheka was dissolved in 1922, but the name outlived it: throughout the Soviet era, secret policemen of every successor agency were still known as Chekists.

Which Marxist won Chile's presidency in a 1970 election and died during the military coup of September 1973?

Salvador Allende has been described as the first Marxist elected president of a liberal democracy in Latin America. With no outright winner at the polls, Chile's Congress chose him in a run-off.

Which Russian author was forced by the Soviet Communist Party to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Boris Pasternak had seen his novel Doctor Zhivago turned down at home, so the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and first published there in 1957.

Which annual observance did the German Marxist Clara Zetkin propose at a 1910 socialist conference in Copenhagen?

International Women's Day was agreed in Copenhagen with no date attached. On 8 March 1917 women textile workers marched in Petrograd, setting off the revolution that toppled the tsar.

Which married couple were executed at Sing Sing in 1953 for passing American military secrets to the Soviet Union?

The Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, were the first American civilians executed on such charges, and the first put to death for them in peacetime.

On his farm in 1948, Whittaker Chambers hid microfilm implicating Alger Hiss inside which item of produce?

A pumpkin, hollowed out, held the film only briefly, but the press seized on the detail and the stolen government documents have been called the Pumpkin Papers ever since.

For which American newspaper was Karl Marx European correspondent from 1852 to 1862, his main source of income?

New-York Daily Tribune readers got more than they knew, because Friedrich Engels also filed articles under Marx's by-line. Marx himself resented the paper's edits and deadlines.

Which Russian anarchist, Karl Marx's great rival, was expelled from the First International at its 1872 Hague Congress?

Mikhail Bakunin was accused by Marx of running a secret organisation inside the International. He answered by founding a rival Anti-Authoritarian International that same year.

Which coal miner's reported 102-tonne shift in 1935 made him the poster figure for record-chasing Soviet workers?

Alexei Stakhanov was said to have dug 14 times his quota in under six hours. The feat put him on posters at home and on the cover of Time magazine in the United States.

Which Soviet agronomist, head of the Institute of Genetics from 1940, rejected Mendel's laws and had critics jailed?

Trofim Lysenko saw his pseudoscience raised to state doctrine. Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute.

Which US diplomat's 1946 'Long Telegram' from Moscow argued that Soviet expansion had to be contained?

George Kennan made the same case a year later in the journal Foreign Affairs, signing the article only with the pseudonym 'X'. Containment went on to anchor American policy for the rest of the Cold War.

Which lawyer led Russia's Provisional Government for its last three months before the Bolsheviks overthrew it in 1917?

Alexander Kerensky's father had taught the young Lenin at school in Simbirsk and helped him into university. The son fled Russia and died in exile in New York in 1970.

Which yacht, namesake of Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, carried Fidel Castro and 81 other rebels home in 1956?

Granma is an affectionate English word for a grandmother, and the second-hand boat is said to have been named for a previous owner's. A Cuban province now carries the name too.