From Communism To Anti Communism

Boris Souvarine moved from communism, in the first years of the Soviet régime, to anti-communism by the 1930s and throughout the rest of his long life. This book gives us a new and original perspective on the period that runs from the Russian Revolution to the 1950s and allows us to better understand that era. The documents come from the Boris Souvarine Collection consisting of his working notes, press clippings, and documentation concerning East-West relations collected by Souvarine.

How was anti-communism organised in the West? This book covers the agents, aims, and arguments of various transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War. Existing narratives often place the United States – and especially the CIA – at the centre of anti-communist activity. The book instead opens up new fields of research transnationally.

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's "first line of defense" against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's "commonsense anticommunism," she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Deal order led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s. Relying on untapped archival sources, Luff reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

Not long after the Allied victories in Europe and Japan, America's attention turned from world war to cold war. The perceived threat of communism had a definite and significant impact on all levels of American popular culture, from government propaganda films like Red Nightmare in Time magazine to Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. This work examines representations of anti-communist sentiment in American popular culture from the early fifties through the mid-sixties. The discussion covers television programs, films, novels, journalism, maps, memoirs, and other works that presented anti-communist ideology to millions of Americans and influenced their thinking about these controversial issues. It also points out the different strands of anti-communist rhetoric, such as liberal and countersubversive ones, that dominated popular culture in different media, and tells a much more complicated story about producers' and consumers' ideas about communism through close study of the cultural artifacts of the Cold War. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Boris Souvarine moved from communism, in the first years of the Soviet régime, to anti-communism by the 1930s and throughout the rest of his long life. This book gives us a new and original perspective on the period that runs from the Russian Revolution to the 1950s and allows us to better understand that era. The documents come from the Boris Souvarine Collection consisting of his working notes, press clippings, and documentation concerning East-West relations collected by Souvarine.

This book focuses on the values, beliefs, fears and actions of Brazilian groups that throughout the twentieth century fought the red menace. It is based on broad and diversified documentary sources, including police files, archives of political leaders, traditional press periodicals, newspapers and brochures of right-wing organizations, monuments, caricatures, and photographs. The work is a major contribution to better understanding the political impact of right-wing movements in Brazil and the justifications made for the authoritarian coups of 1937 and 1964. The author explains the intricacy of the political movements, leaderships and organizations that gathered around the fight against communism, as well as the ideas and images used to disseminate their arguments, including international sources of inspiration. The argument presented is not one of mere condemnation, but as dictatorship has reared its head post-1964 an assessment is long overdue in order to understand the political impact of anti-communist movements which have contributed to enable the longstanding police-military repressive machine of the Brazilian State. The current return of anti-communism to the Brazilian political scene is evidence of the book's thesis that this phenomenon took root in Brazilian society during the first decades of the twentieth century. On Guard Against the Red Menace helps to understand why a candidate of military origin who promises to rid the country of the reds won the October 2018 elections in Brazil, by adopting a discursive strategy that represents the appropriation of the anti-communist tradition analyzed in this book.

The American anticommunist movement has been viewed as a product of right-wing hysteria that deeply scarred our society and institutions. This book restores the struggle against communism to its historic place in American life. Richard Gid Powers shows that McCarthyism, red-baiting, and black-listing were only one aspect of this struggle and that the movement was in fact composed of a wide range of Americans--Jews, Protestants, blacks, Catholics, Socialists, union leaders, businessmen, and conservatives--whose ideas and political initiatives were rooted not in ignorance and fear but in real knowledge and experience of the Communist system. "Not Without Power is superbly written and richly detailed. Perceptive and thoughtful, it is an impressively thorough and valuable book."--David J. Garrow "One of the contributions of [Powers's] provocative narrative history is to bring to life certain segments of anti-Communist opinion that have largely been forgotten."--Sean Wilentz, New York Times Book Review "[Powers] makes extensive use of primary sources and uncovers much that is new. He vividly recreates the complex relationships within and between several ethnic and radical communities within the United States, including their firsthand and often disillusioning experience with communism. . . . The depth and range of his work add a great deal to knowledge."--Journal of American History "A valuable, well-executed study and summation of a vast topic, one whose various threads the author has woven into a rich tapestry."--Richard M. Fried, Reviews in American History

This handbook explores anti-communism as an overarching phenomenon of twentieth-century global history, showing how anti-communist policies and practices transformed societies around the world. It advances research on anti-communism by looking beyond ideologies and propaganda to uncover how these ideas were put into practice. Case studies examine the role of states and non-state actors in anti-communist persecutions, and cover a range of topics, including social crises, capitalist accumulation and dispossession, political clientelism and warfare. Through its comparative perspective, the handbook reveals striking similarities between different cases from various world regions and highlights the numerous long-term consequences of anti-communism that exceeded by far the struggle against communism in a narrow sense. Contributing to the growing body of work on the social history of mass violence, this volume is an essential resource for students and scholars interested to understand how twentieth-century anti-communist persecutions have shaped societies around the world today. Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.