Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party

McAdams (Judging the Past in Unified Germany), a professor of international affairs at the University of Notre Dame, sheds light on the enduring legacies of the Communist Party in this cogent history of the party from Marx to Gorbachev. In 1985, long after communism had been written off by many as a dying ideology, no less than 38% of the world’s population lived under communist regimes. What explains the longevity and global appeal of this ideology, even as it morphed into a form of one-party dictatorship that Marx and Engels would have found unrecognizable? For McAdams, the answer lies in the way Communist leaders such as Fidel Castro, Mao, and Stalin imprinted their personalities and political styles onto the party, transforming it from a well-oiled bureaucracy to a vessel for charismatic populism. The Communist Party was different in different places; rather than evolving toward a single goal or form, its development over time was marked by “fits and starts, successes and failures, and steps that were neither forward nor backward.” The historiography on Marxism, as well as communist movements in general, is notoriously inaccessible; McAdams delivers a lucid and beautifully written volume that defies the norm, providing a highly readable study of the party. (Oct.)