Communism Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Communism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Communism shaped the twentieth century more than any other single idea, yet most people know it only through a handful of names and dates. Behind them sits a richer story: a pamphlet printed in a back room, rival Internationals, a tune borrowed from a Christmas carol, newspapers whose names became jokes, and leaders who gave their own names to whole systems. This quiz treats communism as history and political theory. It covers the thinkers who came before and after Marx, the texts and slogans, the party congresses that changed course, the symbols and songs, the films and novels that argued about it, and the handful of states that kept the label into the twenty-first century. Nothing here is about today's elections. It suits pub-quiz regulars, history students and anyone who has ever wondered what the slogans and jargon actually meant to the people who used them. Each answer comes with a short explanation and a source you can check.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the name of Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's daily founded in 1912, mean in English?
Truth
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.
Q 02What does 'Bolshevik', the name of Lenin's faction from 1903, literally mean?
Majority
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.
Q 03The Communist Manifesto's first section calls all recorded history the history of what?
Class struggles
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.
Q 04May Day, 1 May, marks 1886 eight-hour-day strikes that climaxed days later in the Haymarket affair in which US city?
Chicago
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.
Q 05The alias Joseph Stalin used from 1912 derives from the Russian word for which material?
Steel
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.
Q 06Which state dropped communism from its constitution in 2009 while writing in its 'military first' policy?
North Korea
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.
Q 07Who was enshrined as his country's 'eternal President' by a 1998 constitutional preamble?
Kim Il Sung
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.
Q 08Which Soviet leader told the 1961 Party Congress the USSR would reach communism by 1980?
Nikita Khrushchev
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.
Q 09Warren Beatty won the Best Director Oscar for which 1981 epic about the journalist John Reed?
Reds
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.
Q 10Which 2006 German drama about a Stasi officer spying in East Berlin won the foreign-language Oscar?
The Lives of Others
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.
Q 11Which 1939 comedy, sold with the tagline 'Garbo Laughs!', casts Greta Garbo as a Soviet envoy?
Ninotchka
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.
Q 12On the hammer and sickle, made the official Soviet emblem in July 1923, the sickle stands for whom?
The peasantry
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.
Q 13Eugène Pottier meant his 1871 lyrics for The Internationale to be sung to which anthem's tune?
La Marseillaise
Q 21In which city was The Communist Manifesto first printed, as a 23-page German pamphlet, in 1848?
London
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.
Q 22Which Indian state voted in the country's first communist government, led by E. M. S. Namboodiripad?
Kerala
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.
Q 23Jim Connell's 1889 socialist anthem 'The Red Flag' is usually sung to the tune of which carol?
O Tannenbaum
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.
Q 14What name was given to the screenwriters and directors cited for contempt after defying HUAC in 1947?
The Hollywood Ten
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.
Q 15Which activist was Gus Hall's running mate on the Communist Party USA ticket in 1980 and 1984?
Angela Davis
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.
Q 16Which rival doctrine, made Soviet state policy in 1926, opposed the theory of 'permanent revolution'?
Socialism in one country
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.
Q 17Which Southeast Asian kingdom fell in December 1975 to its People's Revolutionary Party?
Laos
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'.
Q 18Which country's People's Republic, proclaimed in 1924, spent nearly seven decades as a Soviet satellite?
Mongolia
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.
Q 19What term, literally 'self-publishing', named the banned writings hand-copied across the Soviet bloc?
Samizdat
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.
Q 20Luxemburg and Liebknecht's league, which became Germany's Communist Party in 1918, was named after whom?
Spartacus
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.
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.
Q 24Which Welsh mill owner bought an Indiana town in 1825 to found New Harmony?
Robert Owen
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.
Q 25Which 1649 English group, also called True Levellers, farmed the common land at St George's Hill?
The Diggers
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.
Q 26Which leader dotted his Balkan country with bunkers, 5.7 per square kilometre, between 1967 and 1986?
Enver Hoxha
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.
Q 27Which capital's Palace of the Parliament, begun under Ceaușescu in 1984, is Earth's heaviest building?
Bucharest
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.
Q 28Which city hosted the founding congress of the Second International in 1889?
Paris
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.
Q 29Which playwright led Civic Forum in 1989 and went on to be Czechoslovakia's last president?
Václav Havel
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.
Q 30Which East German car, built in Zwickau with duroplast panels, could have a 13-year waiting list?
Trabant
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.