50 Fun Facts About Communism

What does the name of Pravda, the Soviet party's official newspaper from 1912, mean in English?

Truth was the name, while the government paper Izvestia meant 'the news', which gave Soviet readers a joke: there is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia.

What does 'Bolshevik', the name Lenin's faction won at a 1903 party congress vote, literally mean?

Majority, from the Russian bolshinstvo, was the label Lenin's side claimed after the vote, leaving Julius Martov's rivals branded Mensheviks, the 'minority', for the rest of their history.

The Communist Manifesto's first section calls all recorded history the history of what?

Class struggles, in Marx's famous line, make up 'the history of all hitherto existing society', with freeman and slave, lord and serf as the opening examples.

May Day, 1 May, commemorates an 1886 general strike for the eight-hour day in which US city?

Chicago's Haymarket affair of May 1886 is what the Second International chose to honour in 1889 when it fixed 1 May as a worldwide day of labour demonstrations.

The alias Joseph Stalin used from 1912 derives from the Russian word for which material?

Steel, or stal in Russian, gave the man born Ioseb Jughashvili a name usually rendered 'Man of Steel', chosen years before he rose to power.

Which state dropped communism from its constitution in 2009 but kept its 'military first' policy?

North Korea's 2009 amendment dropped the word entirely, declaring a socialist state guided by Kim Jong Il's Songun policy alongside Juche, the self-reliance doctrine written in since 1992.

Who was enshrined as his country's 'eternal President' by a 1998 constitutional preamble?

Kim Il Sung still holds the presidency on paper: the 1998 text was renamed the 'Kim Il-sung Constitution', so his successors have ruled under other titles ever since.

At the 1961 Party Congress, Khrushchev promised full communism in the USSR within how many years?

20 years, or by 1980, was the deadline in the new party programme; the same congress voted to move Stalin's remains out of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square.

Warren Beatty won the Best Director Oscar for which 1981 epic about the journalist John Reed?

Reds follows John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and Beatty co-wrote, produced, directed and starred, though the film lost Best Picture to Chariots of Fire.

Which 2006 German drama about a Stasi officer spying in East Berlin won the foreign-language Oscar?

The Lives of Others was a debut feature: writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had never made a full-length film before it took the 2007 Academy Award.

Which 1939 comedy, sold with the tagline 'Garbo Laughs!', casts Greta Garbo as a Soviet envoy?

Ninotchka was Garbo's first comedy and her penultimate film, and it was banned in the Soviet Union and its satellites for poking fun at Moscow's commissars.

On the hammer and sickle, made the official Soviet emblem in July 1923, the sickle stands for whom?

The peasantry's sickle was paired with the industrial worker's hammer in a design Yevgeny Kamzolkin first drew in 1918 as a May Day decoration, five years before it became official.

Eugène Pottier meant his 1871 lyrics for The Internationale to be sung to which anthem's tune?

La Marseillaise was the tune Pottier, a Commune veteran, had in mind; the melody sung today was composed only in 1888 by Pierre De Geyter for a workers' choir in Lille.

What name was given to the screenwriters and directors cited for contempt after defying HUAC in 1947?

The Hollywood Ten included Dalton Trumbo, who went on writing under other names until Otto Preminger publicly announced him as screenwriter of Exodus in 1960, breaking the blacklist.

Which activist was Gus Hall's running mate on the Communist Party USA ticket in 1980 and 1984?

Angela Davis, a decade after J. Edgar Hoover had put her on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, ran twice on the party ticket before leaving the CPUSA in 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved.

Which rival doctrine, made Soviet state policy in 1926, opposed the theory of 'permanent revolution'?

Socialism in one country, Stalin's claim that the USSR could build socialism without waiting for world revolution, became state policy after his January 1926 article On the Issues of Leninism.

Which Southeast Asian kingdom fell in December 1975 to its People's Revolutionary Party?

Laos became the Lao People's Democratic Republic at a congress that ended a 600-year monarchy, and the party that took over still cites 'Kaysone Phomvihane Thought' in its statutes.

Which country, a Soviet satellite from 1924 to 1992, became the world's second communist state?

Mongolia's People's Republic followed the Soviet Union by just two years and outlasted every other satellite, staying in Moscow's orbit for its entire 68-year existence.

What term, literally 'self-publishing', named the banned writings hand-copied across the Soviet bloc?

Samizdat texts were typed onto carbon or tissue paper in several copies at once, because photocopiers were tightly controlled; tamizdat, by contrast, meant works smuggled out and printed abroad.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht's league, which became Germany's Communist Party in 1918, was named after whom?

Spartacus, leader of the slave uprising against Rome in 73-71 BCE, lent his name to a group that began in August 1914 as the 'International Group' of SPD members who opposed the war.

In which city was The Communist Manifesto first printed, as a 23-page German pamphlet, in 1848?

London's Communist Workers' Educational Association printed the pamphlet anonymously at 46 Liverpool Street in the City, the year before Marx himself settled in the capital for good.

Which Indian state voted in the country's first communist government, led by E. M. S. Namboodiripad?

Kerala handed the Communist Party of India 60 seats in the state's first assembly election, and Namboodiripad took office on 5 April 1957, a decade after Indian independence.

Jim Connell's 1889 socialist anthem 'The Red Flag' is usually sung to the tune of which carol?

O Tannenbaum carries the words Connell wanted set to the Jacobite air 'The White Cockade', and the song still closes Labour Party conferences in Britain.

Which Welsh mill owner, famous for New Lanark, bought an Indiana town in 1825 to found New Harmony?

Robert Owen paid for 180 buildings and thousands of acres along the Wabash River, but his model settlement proved an economic failure and lasted about two years.

Which 1649 English group, also called True Levellers, farmed the common land at St George's Hill?

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, alarmed the Council of State with their communal farming near Weybridge, a site that is now one of England's most exclusive private estates.

Which leader dotted his Balkan country with bunkers, 5.7 per square kilometre, between 1967 and 1986?

Enver Hoxha's bunkers were never used for their intended purpose in his lifetime, and today many serve as cafés, storehouses and animal shelters across the Albanian countryside.

Which capital's Palace of the Parliament, begun under Ceaușescu in 1984, is Earth's heaviest building?

Bucharest's palace weighs about 4.1 million tonnes and holds 1,100 rooms, designed by 28-year-old contest winner Anca Petrescu as the centrepiece of Ceaușescu's rebuilding of the city.

Which city hosted the founding congress of the Second International in 1889?

Paris opened the congress on 14 July 1889, a century to the day after the storming of the Bastille, while the city's world fair showed off the new Eiffel Tower.

Which playwright led Civic Forum in 1989 and went on to be Czechoslovakia's last president?

Václav Havel had co-written the Charter 77 manifesto partly in protest at the jailing of the psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, then served as the Czech Republic's first president until 2003.

Which East German car, built in Zwickau with duroplast panels, could have a 13-year waiting list?

Trabant bodies used a hard plastic made from recycled Soviet cotton waste and dye-industry resins, and the little cars became the image of 1989 as East Germans drove them across the opened border.

In which wartime year was the Comintern dissolved as a gesture to the Soviet Union's Western allies?

1943 saw the Comintern wound up by Stalin on 15 May, 24 years after Lenin had founded it in Moscow to coordinate world revolution, and just two days after the Axis surrender in Tunisia.

Whose 1933 Rockefeller Center fresco was destroyed after he refused to paint out a portrait of Lenin?

Diego Rivera repainted the lost Man at the Crossroads from photographs in Mexico City, at a smaller scale, under the new title Man, Controller of the Universe.

Which singer did Gennadi Gerasimov name Moscow's 1989 hands-off doctrine for the Warsaw Pact after?

Frank Sinatra's 'My Way' gave Gerasimov his line in Helsinki on 25 October 1989: 'So every country decides on its own which road to take', burying the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine.

Which artist, a Communist Party member, drew the dove on the 1949 World Peace Congress poster?

Pablo Picasso's lithograph became the congress emblem, and the day before it opened his partner Françoise Gilot gave birth to a daughter they named Paloma, Spanish for dove.

Which economic policy, generalised from 1950, set Tito's Yugoslavia apart from Soviet-style planning?

Workers' self-management handed factories to councils of their own employees, a system Tito's regime generalised from 1950 after refusing to bow to Moscow, and Yugoslavia never fully joined Comecon.

In Poland's partly free June 1989 election, Solidarity took how many of the new Senate's 100 seats?

99 seats out of 100 went to Solidarity, which also took every one of the 161 Sejm seats it was allowed to contest, and by August Tadeusz Mazowiecki led the Eastern Bloc's first non-communist government.

In which British colony did Ho Chi Minh unite three factions into Vietnam's Communist Party in 1930?

Hong Kong's Wah Yan College in Kowloon hosted the 'Unification Conference' of 3-7 February 1930; within months the Comintern had the new party renamed the Indochinese Communist Party.

Which Hungarian leader, in power from 1956 to 1988, presided over so-called 'goulash communism'?

János Kádár's consumer-minded liberalisation earned his country the 1970s nickname 'the happiest barracks' in the Soviet camp, and his 1968 New Economic Mechanism loosened central planning.

What was the first book Marx and Engels wrote together, an 1845 attack on the Young Hegelians?

The Holy Family took aim at Bruno Bauer's circle, with Engels finishing his few chapters before leaving France and Marx completing the rest by the end of November 1844, the start of their friendship.

What term, from the Latin for a system of names, covered the party-vetted holders of key Soviet posts?

Nomenklatura was literally the party's list of approved names for every important job, and critics called its members a privileged new elite that had replaced the old capitalist one.

Santiago Carrillo, author of the 1977 book Eurocommunism and the State, led which country's party?

Spain's PCE leader Carrillo gave the 1970s trend its defining text, then met Italy's Enrico Berlinguer and France's Georges Marchais in Madrid in 1977 to proclaim a communism independent of Moscow.

In which year was Cuba's present Communist Party founded, ten years before its first regular congress?

1965 was the founding year, on 3 October, yet the party waited a full decade before holding its first regular congress in 1975, and only the 1976 constitution named it society's 'superior guiding force'.

Which Hungarian-born novelist wrote Darkness at Noon, the 1940 story of an Old Bolshevik on trial?

Arthur Koestler wrote it in German as Sonnenfinsternis, 'solar eclipse', and the original manuscript was thought lost until a doctoral student found a copy in a Zurich library in 2015.

Which US Attorney General led the 1919-20 raids on suspected radicals with a young J. Edgar Hoover?

A. Mitchell Palmer handed the 24-year-old Hoover a new General Intelligence Division in August 1919, and Hoover organised the later raids that aimed to deport suspected anarchists and communists.

Which portmanteau, once a Soviet party department's short name, now means any highly politicised art?

Agitprop fused 'agitation' and 'propaganda', the two halves of a department attached to every Communist Party committee, before drifting into the vocabulary of theatre and protest art.

Who led the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic in practice during its 133 days from March to August?

Béla Kun ran the republic while Sándor Garbai held the nominal top job, an arrangement that lasted from 21 March to 1 August 1919 before the experiment collapsed.

Which 1516 Thomas More book describes an island with no private property, its name meaning 'nowhere'?

Utopia fuses the Greek 'ou' (not) and 'topos' (place); on More's island goods sit in warehouses and citizens simply request what they need, an idea communists later claimed as an ancestor.

Which Italian Communist Party founder filled over 30 notebooks in Mussolini's prisons with theory?

Antonio Gramsci filled some 3,000 pages between his 1926 arrest and his release shortly before his death in 1937, arguing that ruling classes hold power through culture as much as force.

Which microstate had a communist-socialist coalition from 1945 until the 1957 'Rovereta affair'?

San Marino's coalition fell in the 'Rovereta affair': after a socialist deputy defected in September 1957, Christian Democrats occupied a factory at Rovereta and declared a provisional government.

Which of Engels's literary executors was branded a 'revisionist' for urging reform over revolution?

Eduard Bernstein's 'evolutionary socialism' split the movement, pitting him against orthodox Marxists like Karl Kautsky and radicals like Rosa Luxemburg, despite the trust Engels had placed in him.