Anti-communism

• 1. Introduction

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  Anti-communism is one of the most widespread political forces of the modern era, and its roots reach back to a single night in October 1917. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they did not only create a new government. They created a new enemy. Within months, armed opposition took the field. Within decades, that opposition had drawn in monarchists and anarchists, Catholic popes and Buddhist monks, liberal economists and fascist dictators. The question the story poses is not simply who opposed communism. It is what they each feared, what they were willing to do, and how the same label covered movements with almost nothing else in common.

  The first organized anti-communist body was the Russian White movement, which took up arms against the Bolshevik government in 1918. Foreign governments backed the Whites militarily, marking the first time anti-communism became an official state policy. The Red Army defeated them. The Soviet Union was established in 1922. Yet the defeat did not end the opposition. It scattered it across the globe, and from that scattering grew a century of conflict.

• 2. The First Red Scare

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  In the United States, the fear arrived quickly. The First Red Scare ran from 1919 to 1920, just a year or two after the Russian Revolution, and it set a pattern that American politics would repeat for decades. Conservatives, monarchists, fascists, liberals, and social democrats all found themselves on the same side of the argument during the 1920s and 1930s, united by opposition to Moscow even when they agreed on little else.

  Anti-communist fervor in America reached its sharpest pitch in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A Hollywood blacklist was established. The House Un-American Activities Committee held televised hearings. Senator Joseph McCarthy led what became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings. The John Birch Society was founded. President Harry Truman formulated the Truman Doctrine specifically to stop Soviet expansionism, yet he also called McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has," arguing that McCarthy's tactics divided the bipartisan foreign policy that containment required.

  Liberal anti-communists like Daniel Moynihan drew a sharp line between their position and McCarthy's. Moynihan observed that the reaction to McCarthy produced what he called a "modish anti anti-communism" that treated any serious discussion of the Soviet threat as impolite. He later asked, after the declassified Venona project revealed real Soviet spy networks, whether less official secrecy might have prevented both McCarthyism and the liberal overreaction to it. The tension Moynihan named never fully resolved.

• 3. Fascism's Embrace

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  Italian Fascism, founded and led by Benito Mussolini, took power in Italy after years of leftist unrest had convinced many conservatives that a communist revolution was inevitable. Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest note that in the early 1920s the Nazis were just one of many nationalist and fascist parties competing to lead Germany's anti-communist movement. They only came to dominate during the Great Depression, when they organized street battles against German Communist formations.

  When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels established the "Anti-Komintern," a body that produced vast amounts of anti-Bolshevik material aimed at global audiences. In 1936, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, with Italy joining in 1937 and Finland and Spain signing in 1941. The first article of the treaty committed Germany and Japan to sharing intelligence on Comintern activities and planning joint operations. The second article explicitly invited other nations whose domestic peace was threatened by the Communist International to join.

  Communists were among the first people the Nazis imprisoned. Dachau, when it opened in 1933, held communists, leading socialists, and other designated enemies of the state. After the Reichstag Fire, the Sturmabteilung carried out violent nationwide suppression and arrested four thousand members of the Communist Party of Germany. Nazi propaganda merged anti-communism with antisemitism under the label "Judeo-Bolshevism," a fusion that ultimately helped justify the Holocaust. Hitler's speech at a Nuremberg rally in September 1937 identified communism with what he called "a fact proved by irrefutable evidence": a Jewish world conspiracy operating from Moscow. During the two months spanning September to October 1941, German SS men killed approximately nine thousand Soviet prisoners of war at Sachsenhausen alone.

• 4. The Cold War's Architecture

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  NATO was founded as an explicit anti-communist military alliance in 1949. The containment policy of the United States government drove support for anti-communist forces across the globe throughout the Cold War. Military conflicts between communists and anti-communists reached across continents: the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the First Indochina War, the Malayan Emergency, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and Operation Condor all fell within this broader struggle.

  In Indonesia, suspicions about Communist involvement in the September 30 incident led to anti-communist purges from October 1965 into early 1966 that killed an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 people. Western governments, in particular the United States, provided the Indonesian military with weapons, money, equipment, and lists containing the names of thousands of suspected communists. A tribunal in late 2016 declared these massacres a crime against humanity and named the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia as accomplices.

  In South Africa, the ideology of anti-communism mapped closely onto racial lines, with white South Africans predominantly holding anti-communist views. In 1950, the government banned the South African Communist Party through the Suppression of Communism Act. The Afrikaans term rooi gevaar, meaning "red danger," captured the cultural weight of the fear. At the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, President F. W. De Klerk saw an opening for a peaceful end to apartheid, a direct downstream consequence of the Cold War's conclusion.

• 5. Religious Voices

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  Pope Pius IX issued a papal encyclical called Quanta cura in which he labeled communism and socialism the most fatal error. Pope John Paul II was a harsh critic as well. In Italy, the Christian Democracy party founded by Alcide De Gasperi in 1943 carried papal opposition into practical politics, dominating Italian governance for nearly fifty years until its dissolution in 1993, consistently blocking the Italian Communist Party from reaching power.

  In Australia, the Roman Catholic movement led by B. A. Santamaria worked from 1945 onward with the Australian Labor Party leadership to counter alleged communist infiltration of trade unions. Industrial Groups formed to oppose communist influence were active from 1945 to 1954. After Labor's loss of the 1954 election, federal leader H. V. Evatt blamed the "Groupers" for the defeat. The resulting split expelled many Groupers from the ALP and led to the formation of the Democratic Labor Party, which then preferenced the Liberal Party of Australia, keeping it in power for over two decades.

  Archbishop Josef Mindszenty of Esztergom, head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, was arrested, tortured, and subjected to trials between 1949 and 1956 under the communist government. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he was freed, then forced to take refuge in the United States embassy in Budapest, where he remained until 1971 when the Vatican and the Hungarian government arranged for him to leave to Austria. In the following years he traveled to Hungarian communities in Canada, the United States, Germany, Austria, South Africa, and Venezuela, conducting what he described as a campaign against the atrocities committed against him and the Hungarian people. The Vatican eventually stripped him of his titles.

  In Vietnam, the Buddhist monk Thich Huyen Quang wrote a letter in 1977 to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong documenting what he described as oppression by the Marxist-Leninist regime. He and five other senior monks were arrested and detained. In 1982, he was placed under permanent house arrest after publicly denouncing the state-controlled Vietnam Buddhist Sangha. The Thai monk Kittivuddho remarked in an interview that killing communists did not constitute a violation of the Buddhist principle of non-violence, a statement that placed the religious logic of anti-communism at its most extreme.

• 6. Converts and Witnesses

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  Leszek Kolakowski was a Polish communist who became, after his break with the party, one of the most important critics of Marxist thought. His three-volume history Main Currents of Marxism is described as "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century."

  The 1949 book The God That Failed gathered essays from six formerly committed communists who were writers and journalists. Its promotional byline stated directly: "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about communism." Contributors included Louis Fischer, Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright. Their testimonies shared a single theme: disillusionment with communism and the reasons behind abandoning it.

  Whittaker Chambers, an American former Soviet spy, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and implicated Alger Hiss. His 1952 memoir Witness became, in the words of those who received it, "the principal rallying cry of anti-Communist conservatives." Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, where it was banned, and published in the West in 1957. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which the Soviet authorities found deeply unwelcome. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 for works including The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, books that brought the Soviet forced labor camp system to global attention. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

  George Orwell, a democratic socialist, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both of which used allegory to address Soviet totalitarianism. Arthur Koestler, a former member of the Communist Party of Germany, wrote Darkness at Noon, based on the Moscow Trials, which made him one of the most prominent anti-communist intellectuals of his period. Koestler's novel The Gladiators used the slave uprising led by Spartacus in the Roman Empire as an allegory for the Russian Revolution.

• 7. Media, Memory, and Dissent

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  Samizdat, the practice of hand-copying censored publications and passing them from reader to reader across the Soviet bloc, built what one observer described as a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s. Vladimir Bukovsky defined it this way: "I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it." The punishment for being caught possessing or copying such materials was severe.

  Voice of America began broadcasting in Russian in 1947 to counter Soviet propaganda directed at American leaders and policies. The Soviet Union responded with aggressive electronic jamming of VOA broadcasts in 1949. Other broadcasters including Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, Radio France International, and the BBC World Service all sent language-specific programming behind the Iron Curtain. The BBC World Service in particular broadcast to audiences who had no other access to uncensored news.

  Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, had cooperated with Communist Party of Korea members in the 1940s in support of Korean independence against Imperial Japan. After the Korean War, he became an outspoken anti-communist who viewed the Cold War as the final conflict between God and Satan. In 1972, Moon predicted the fall of communism based on his book the Divine Principle, writing that communism, begun in 1917, would decline after its seventieth year and be "altogether ruined" at that point. In 1976, Moon established News World Communications, which publishes The Washington Times. According to a report by The Washington Post, the paper was established by Moon to combat communism and serve as a conservative alternative to what he perceived as a liberal rival. In 1980, the Unification movement founded CAUSA International, an anti-communist educational organization based in New York City that was active in twenty-one countries by the 1980s.

• 8. After the Wall

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  After the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's communist governments were overthrown. Anti-communism did not disappear with them. In the early 1990s, many new anti-communist movements emerged from the former Soviet bloc following failed elections and Boris Yeltsin's seizure of power. More than thirty electoral blocs formed to contest that election. Among them were movements with names like Choice of Russia, the Civic Union for Stability Justice and Progress, the Constructive Ecological Movement, the Russian Democratic Reform Movement, Dignity and Mercy, and Women of Russia. Some left-wing parties within these movements described the Stalinist period as an "unmitigated disaster for socialists."

  The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed Resolution 1481/2006 on the 25th of January 2006, which "strongly condemns crimes of totalitarian communist regimes." The European Parliament designated the 23rd of August as the Black Ribbon Day, a remembrance day for victims of twentieth-century totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

  Anti-communist movements continue to operate today in opposition to the People's Republic of China and other remaining communist states. In Vietnam, anti-communist organizations remain illegal. Albania has enacted what it calls the Law on Communist Genocide to expedite prosecution of human rights violations by former governments. The lawyer Gao Zhisheng, described by one outlet as "one of the most persistent and courageous thorns" against China under communist rule, published a memoir in 2016 recounting torture sessions and three years of solitary confinement. He was disappeared in August 2017. As of April 2024, his family has not heard from him.