Annotation
Course Description
The ideological consensus of the post-communist era classified Communism as one of the two totalitarian movements of the 20th century which threatened the Western civilization of Enlightenment and democracy by the barbaric rule of violence and terror. In this Manichean vision, Communism is reduced to merely one of its many faces – namely Stalinism. This course is devoted to the reading of the book by David Priestland which deconstructs this image by exposing huge differences between various incarnations of the Communist idea across historical time and geo-cultural space. Priestland follows the Communist idea since its beginning at the radical wing of the Jacobins in the French Revolution through its successive elaborations by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Germany and Vladimir I. Lenin and Joseph V. Stalin in Russia. He transcends, however, the Eurocentric framework of conventional accounts of Communism by the chapters about Communism in the Far and Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Thus he provides the first truly global account of the Communist movement.