Table of Contents

S. A. Smith: Introduction: Towards a Global History of Communism PART I: IDEOLOGY 1: Paresh Chattopadhyay: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Communism 2: Lars T. Lih: Lenin and Bolshevism 3: Kevin McDermott: Stalin and Stalinism 4: Timothy Cheek: Mao and Maoism PART 2: GLOBAL MOMENTS 5: Jean-François Fayet: 1919 6: Tim Rees: 1936 7: Sergei Radchenko: 1956 8: Maud Anne Bracke: 1968 9: Matthias Middell: 1989 PART 3: GLOBAL COMMUNISM 10: Alexander Vatlin and S. A. Smith: The Comintern 11: Pavel Kolár: Communism in Eastern Europe 12: Yang Kuisong and S. A. Smith: Communism in China 13: Anna Belogurova: Communism in Southeast Asia 14: Mike Gonzalez: Communism in Latin America 15: Anne Alexander: Communism in the Islamic World 16: Allison Drew: Communism in Africa PART 4: COMMUNIST POLITIES AND ECONOMIES 17: Balázs Szalontai: Political and Economic Relations between Communist States 18: Geoff Roberts: Averting Armageddon: The Communist Peace Movement, 1948-1956 19: Daniel Leese: The Cult of Personality and Symbolic Politics 20: Julia C. Strauss: Communist Revolution and Political Terror 21: Sheila Fitzpatrick: Popular Opinion under Communist Regimes 22: Mark Harrison: Communism and Economic Modernization 23: Felix Wemheuer: Collectivization and Famine 24: Paul Betts: The Politics of Plenty: Consumerism in Communist Societies PART 5: COMMUNISM AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 25: Marco Albeltaro: The Life of a Communist Militant 26: Jeremy Brown: Rural Life 27: Tuong Vu: Workers under Communism: Romance and Reality 28: Donna Harsch: Communism and Women 29: Donald Filtzer: Privilege and Inequality in Communist Society 30: Adrienne Lynn Edgar: Nation-Making and National Conflict under Communism PART 6: COMMUNISM AND CULTURE 31: Richard King: Cultural Revolution 32: Mark Gamsa: Communism and the Artistic Intelligentsia 33: Dean Vuletic: Popular Culture 34: Richard Madsen: Religion under Communism 35: Robert Edelman, Anke Hilbrenner, and Susan Brownell: Sport under Communism

About the Author

S. A. Smith is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He was a graduate student at Moscow State University and Peking University in the late 1970s and early 1980s and taught for many years at the University of Essex. More recently, he was professor of comparative history at the European University Institute, Florence. He has written extensively on the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and is currently writing a book which compares the
efforts of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes to eliminate 'superstition' from daily life, in areas such as popular religion, calendrical and life-cycle rituals, agriculture, and folk medicine,
and which explores how sections of the populace engaged the regimes through 'politics of the supernatural'.

Reviews

a valuable place to begin a study of communism and also an expert guide for those seeking to deepen their knowledge of this global phenomenon of the twentieth century.
*John Callaghan, English Historical Review*

the hugely impressive Oxford Handbook of The History of Communism, which is as comprehensive as it is challenging ... Rich in scope while sharply analytical in its understanding of one of the twentieth centurys grand narratives.
*Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football*

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism embraces this new imperative to understand world communism as a polycentric (indeed, often terminally fractious) phenomenon. Its editor S.A. Smith is himself impressively cosmopolitan, an expert on both Soviet and Chinese communism, and almost all of the book's 36 essays -- written by an international cast of scholars -- are comparative in some way ... The collection is enlightening not only about the German and Bolshevik origins of communist politics, but its leaders; about every day and elite life in communist states; about the experiences of intellectuals, artists, workers and farmers; and about its global rise and fall. Smith and his fellow authors maintain a calm, dispassionate tone on the tragic complexities of the communist experiment.
*Julia Lovell, The Guardian*

this collection offers the reader the opportunity to see the global nuances of Communism, the marked similarities of experience of those living in states adhering to fundamental Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the far less easy to understand spaces between.
*Jennifer Cowe, Reviews in History*