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Cuba always had a small but influential Marxist-Leninist movement. It was, however, highly dependent on the U.S. Communist Party for ideas and funds. This propensity to dependence continued as U.S. invasions and embargoes pushed the Castro regime into a tight alliance with the USSR and later with Venezuela. Because the economy has not prospered, large numbers of influential organic intellectuals are now advocating serious changes in the economic model. This, plus changes in U.S. attitudes toward associations with Cuba, appear to be harbingers of improved relations, which should make future changes in the ideological and economic orientation of Cuba possible.

Chapter 1 reaffirms the historical importance of political prisoner and martyr Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison after her hunger strike in 1977. However, unlike previous studies that emphasize Menebhi’s biography, my analysis also focuses on her writings, particularly the inscription of the people and the revolution in her poetry and unfinished essay on female prostitution. In doing so, the chapter uncovers the nego-feminist strategies Menebhi used to circumvent restrictive sociocultural gender norms of the 1970s and feminize and localize the internationalist and seemingly genderless Marxist-Leninist ideology. The chapter also identifies aspects that make Menebhi a trailblazer who provided Moroccan women with a narrative and a political model for the construction of a feminine testimonial voice and feminist aesthetics.

The first section of this chapter describes Stalin and Soviet foreign policy, including ideology and criminality. Like German war aims, those of the Soviet Union in the Second World War were largely decided by one man operating within an ideology, though Soviet Marxism–Leninism was less the leader’s own construct than German Nazism was Hitler’s. The second section examines themes of caution and continuity in Russian/Soviet aims in two areas of direct concern: the regions of the Danube delta and the Straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and of the Baltic and Scandinavia. Succeeding sections consider Soviet aims in central Europe (including Germany and Poland) and how the Soviet Union visualised its postwar relationships with its two great wartime allies, Britain and the United States.

The quotations opening this chapter provide glimpses of a worldview in operation. They suggest how deeply the secret police officers believe in Marxism-Leninism, and how this belief was wrapped up in strong identifications with institutions, most notably the party, the state GDR, and the Stasi. They reflect the success of the SED to create the kind of monolithic intentionality it envisioned for the country as a whole. This chapter is the story of officers' understanding in the making where “in the making” means both—becoming and remaining once become. It shows how socialism in the guise of an idea, a person, an institution, or a setting began to be appealing to these men, and how this appeal becomes compelling through the mutually supporting work of resonances, recognitions, and corroborations. This is done by drawing on the life of one officer, while juxtaposing his development to a more general consideration of others' experience. The officer chosen to allegorize the group over a particular period of time is selected not for reasons of representativeness in a demographic sense—the use of that notion is often just the admittance that one knows little about the relevant processes—but for reasons of highlighting particularly important dynamics of validation.

Communism was the offspring of wars: World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Are such wars likely in the coming decades? If not, new communist regimes on the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist models are unlikely to come to power in the name of Marxism-Leninism. Whether that ideological heritage becomes again a beacon for revolution may depend on whether, in the future, the historical imagination comes to view communism as having been an achievement or a tragedy.

This chapter argues that the Grenada Revolution did not meet the requirements for a social revolution with a working class character. Grenada, like most other Caribbean societies, simply lacked the foundation—material and otherwise—to build socialism, as there did not exist the deep inner structures of capital in science, technology, industry, finance, production and labor to achieve and/or sustain a social revolution. The crisis and collapse of the “Grenada Revolution” and the roles played by the “Grenada revolutionaries” relative to how they attempted to apply certain concepts from Marxism-Leninism and from Soviet ideology on the “Non-Capitalist” path to development had a great deal to do with the authoritarian political culture that survived British colonialism and imperialism through decolonization and independence. Marxism-Leninism complicated the process but was not necessary for the Grenada revolutionary experiment to collapse.

This chapter discusses the attempt to develop an independent, more original and imaginative Marxism-Leninism adapted to Spanish circumstances, which was carried on by Joaquin Maurin and the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (Worker-Peasant Bloc or BOC), formed in Barcelona in March 1931. The name of the new group stemmed from the original Comintern ploy of 1923 to form a Groupe Ouvrier et Paysan (Worker and Peasant Group) as an electoral front for the French Communist Party. The BOC set itself the goal of forming “a Great Worker-Peasant Party,” with the political nucleus formed by the independent Catalan Communist FCC-B, while the BOC was to form a broader mass organization. Maurin and his colleagues argued that this was the most useful strategy, since direct Bolshevization on the basis of the party alone had failed in both France and Spain.

In this chapter, the author reflects on his travel to the forests around Eberswalde, an industrial town located some twenty-five miles northeast of Berlin, in 1990. His purpose was to conduct research on the decline of forests in East Germany, where bureaucrats had a reputation for prim coldness and intolerance of dissent, while finance and trade officials resorted to shrewd business practices. Marxism-Leninism and the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany were blamed for the forest decline, with their aggressive management combined with industrial and farm pollution pushing the forested ecosystem to the brink of economic and ecological collapse. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, West Germans reached out to their eastern counterparts untainted by hypermaterialist socialist forestry. The church foresters for the Protestant Church in Brandenburg and the Catholic Church in Saxony played a key role in the states' return to ecologically based forest management and the rebuilding of the Forest Service.

In this chapter, the author narrates his trip to East Germany in the early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He made observations of marshes, forests, and wetlands as well as the old Prussian “sand and pine” landscape east of the Elbe River. There were reports of a crisis in the eastern forest attributed to the four decades of conflict between Marxism-Leninism and the natural landscape. Forest management under the rule of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany is a testament to its competence and power. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Germany's forest landowners enclosed their forests, which prevented the peasants from foraging for fallen wood and gathering honey, collecting mushrooms, taking small game, and pasturing their livestock on oak and beech mast. Peasants opposed the closing of the forest commons and even won the support of the young Karl Marx. East Germany's forest decline was compounded by weak political geography and ecological and material deficits.

Many writers, including Leon Trotsky, have labeled postrevolutionary dictatorship as “Bonapartism” in which elements of the revolution and the Old Regime are combined following the chaos and fanaticism of the earlier revolutionary phases. In the twentieth century, postrevolutionary dictatorship assumed the institutional form of totalitarianism. In Russia, postrevolutionary dictatorship was characterized by the organizational and ideological continuity maintained by Joseph Stalin between the revolutionary era and his own regime. Stalin himself emerged from the apparatus of the party of revolutionary extremism and made it the foundation of his postrevolutionary rule. In addition, he insisted on the formal observance of revolutionary ideology that he called “Marxism-Leninism.” Stalin's postrevolutionary dictatorship was known for its bureaucratic social base and its cultural conservatism. His personal impact is commonly interpreted as a “revolution from above,” which instituted total socialization and militarization by collectivizing the peasants.

The academic pursuit known as “Sovietology” failed to predict the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. Sovietology is the specialized study of the Soviet Union from the standpoint of history, economics, geography, political science, and occasionally sociology and anthropology. From the perspective of political science, Sovietology focuses on leadership politics and behavior. The much-maligned totalitarian model was not simply a creation of Cold War propaganda. Totalitarianism was invoked by anti-Stalin Marxists such as Leon Trotsky and Rudolf Hilferding to distinguish Stalinism from socialism. Soviet studies helped to defuse the politicians' hysteria about Communist expansion with empirical knowledge of the system's past and current problems. Communism is generally seen as a utopian experiment founded on the Machiavellian theory of Marxism-Leninism.

This chapter analyzes the transcript of the October 11 and 12, 1938 Politburo meetings. It explains that these meetings focused on the publication of the Short Course: The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which was published to erase the role of the Old Bolsheviks in the history of the Communist Party and the building of the Soviet state, leaving only Joseph Stalin as the true and natural successor to Vladimir Lenin. The chapter also suggests that the book was meant to party propagandists, and that its Marxism-Leninism propaganda was used by Stalin and his allies to build and maintain a loyal and dedicated party.

This chapter exposes the sporadic yet barely recorded struggle for the hegemony of ideas in the radical Caribbean movement of the seventies. The resilience of the Caribbean revolutionary movement was primarily due to an alliance between middle class intellectuals, who were of the Marxist-Leninist variety, and popular grassroots supporters, who had their own worldview of African-centered revolutionism. The chapter provides a critical Caribbean historical analysis that includes understanding the boundaries to political and social action set by a particular socio-economic and geopolitical moment, as well as exploring the ideological landscape that determines unique social and political outcomes. It cites the works of Trinidadian calypsonian Valentino and Jamaican reggae vocalist Pablo Moses in illustrating the Afro-Caribbean organic philosophy of the seventies.

This essay analyses the distinctive effects of Marxist-Leninist ideology and Communist practice on states ruled by Communist parties and states with non-Communist or ‘bourgeois’ regimes. Communist regimes assert that they are historically destined to triumph over ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ governments. From 1917 to 1944, the Soviet Union was the sole Communist-governed state. Since 1944 there have been multiple Communist-ruled states. Such states generally have formal state-to-state relations in addition to Communist party-to-party relations. Non-Communist-ruled states may have oppositional relations with domestic and foreign Communist parties as well as formal relations with the foreign ministries of Communist-led states. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has claimed that its decisions bind all Communist parties, but it has also accepted the primacy of a global gathering of Communist parties. Disputes among Communist parties over doctrine and interests that are theoretically congruent raise questions about the coherence of the ideology. Forming a Communist world-state to suppress national rivalries could offer a solution, but at the cost of abandoning national state sovereignties and the autonomy of specific Communist parties.

This chapter draws attention to the eighth Saigon sister, named Xuan. It talks about Xuan's father who resigned from his position of privilege and decided he could no longer work for the French. It also stresses how Xuan learned about Viet Minh after seeing her father reject a life of prestige and wealth to join the August Revolution. The chapter highlights Xuan's patriotism that was nurtured through the liberal education and friendships forged at Lycée Marie Curie. It details how Xuan rejected a life of wealth and privilege and by 1949 left the lycée for a three–month course on Marxism–Leninism before joining the resistance.

The Indochinese Communist Party's substantial impact on Vietnam in late 1945 was marbled by its budding relations with the Việt Minh groups and local government committees around the country. In November 1945, with pressure coming in, following Ho Chi Minh's rejection by the Nationalist Party, the ICP resolved to dissolve. Their hasty disbandment flummoxed the masses and eventually led to mass controversy in Moscow. After the release of a confidential directive titled “Resistance, Country Building” that failed to acknowledge the dissolution, the ICP set off a torrent of action and reaction that galvanized the domestic and international masses in even stride.

This chapter examines the wave of antireligious and atheist campaigns launched during the Khrushchev era, beginning with the Hundred Days campaign of 1954 and again in 1958 until Nikita Khrushchev's forced retirement in 1964. It explains why the Soviet state disrupted the postwar stability of church–state relations and again viewed religion as a problem, and why Khrushchev brought atheism back after it was cast aside by Joseph Stalin. The chapter discusses the Hundred Days campaign and its impact on Soviet religious life, Khrushchev's antireligious propaganda of 1958–1964, and the factors that led to the Soviet Communist Party's renewed offensive against religion, including anxiety about religious revival. It shows that Khrushchev's antireligious campaigns are part of his efforts to redefine the course of Soviet Communism after Stalin's death. For Khrushchev, political de-Stalinization, economic modernization, and ideological mobilization were all necessary to infuse revolutionary vitality back to the ideology of Marxism–Leninism.

This chapter examines how science, and more specifically the real and symbolic force of Soviet space programs, was harnessed as a weapon in Soviet atheist work. In the 1960s, as cosmonauts and astronauts raced to space, the USSR sought to channel cosmic enthusiasm into atheist work, believing that science could deal the final blow to religion. The chapter first considers the explosion of cosmic enthusiasm after successful Soviet space missions before discussing the use of the Moscow Planetarium as a base for natural scientific and scientific atheist propaganda. It also explores state efforts to spread scientific atheism and shows that the Soviets capitalized on Soviet space firsts to proclaim the truth of scientific materialism. However, scientific miracles and cosmic conquests failed to convert the masses to atheism and exposed the ideological blind spots of Marxism–Leninism.