Short History of Communism from the Hoover Institution

[HOZ]

Always been a big history buff so this article about the Hoover Institution was really interesting. It talks about the history of Communism from WWI onwards. Not a detailed examination but a very interesting one. Here is a bit about Communist tourists.


The “Basic Rules” planned for this. Any slipup was to be instantly reported to the group leader. Contact was to be maintained with the nearest Soviet embassy or consulate. Trips around the foreign country were permissible only with the sanction of the group leader—the far-fetched idea that anyone should journey abroad unaccompanied was not even considered! Travelers were advised against taking an overnight train journey with a foreigner of the opposite sex. (Nothing, apparently, needed to be said about homosexuals because same-sex relationships were punishable under Soviet law.)


With such restrictions, it is hardly surprising that Soviet citizens were extremely ill-informed about the rest of the world until Mikhail Gorbachev initiated his perestroika and glasnost reforms in the mid-1980s. “Soviet power” depended on communist rulers’ insulating their subjects from what were regarded as harmful and dangerous influences. It is not an accident that communism, wherever it has strongly established itself, has always restricted international travel, stirred up spy-mania, and jammed foreign radio stations. Where the USSR led, the People’s Republic of China and Cuba followed. And their example was picked up by North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Ethiopia. Communist leaderships in power repeatedly clamped down on the free flow of information in their countries and used propaganda to indoctrinate whole populations. Official media claimed that poverty and oppression were the universal features of life under capitalism; that capitalism was entering a period of terminal decline; and that the future, the brightest of futures, lay with communism. This was the uniform message of communist propagandists from October 1917 to the end of the twentieth century.

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