Chapter 21

Communism was a phenomenon of enormous significance in the world of the 20th century. Communist came to power almost everywhere in the tumultuous wake of war, revolution, or both. The struggle divided continents, countries, and cities into communist and noncommunist halves. It also prompted global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the Global South. The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed the collapse of communist regimes or the abandonment of communist principles practically everywhere. The great goal struggle of capitalism and communism, embodied in the United States and the Soviet Union, was resolved in favor or the former far more quickly and much more peacefully than anyone had imagined possible.

Most European socialists came to believe that they could achieve their goals peacefully and through the process of democratic, which can define themselves as a communist in the 20th century. Russia was called the Soviet Union because they were the first country to experience the revolution. Also, the Marxist theory had to do with communism and how the final stage of historical development was a social equality and collective living would be most fully developed, largely without private property. Socialism was an intermediate stage along the way to that final goal. Karl Marx viewed a prerequisite for revolution of the 20th century that took place in a largely agrarian societies.The communist government controlled the state that were powered, communist movements took root in still other places.

Communist movements self-consciously had the mystique of the earlier French Revolution, which had the new and better worlds that could be constructed by human actions. The French had the old ruling classes and dispossessed landed aristocracies. Communist also worried about the lest of their revolutions end up in a military dictatorship like that of Napoleon following the French Revolution. Marxist ideology was to commit an industrial future that could help the economy to do better in political equality and abolish the private property. Russian and Chinese revolutions shared the general features in respecting they differences.