A Catholic guide to great books and films about communism

Not only do most young people not learn about the horror and evil wrought by communism, it’s not uncommon to hear seemingly well-informed academics, politicians, or journalists to naively romanticize the bloody movement, which began a century ago.

Tuesday, November 7th marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which began the expansion of communism across the world. Whether in Russia or Eastern Europe, Cuba or Ethiopia, everywhere communism was implemented it led to a staggering loss in human life through mass shootings, manmade famines, or concentration camps. French historian Stéphane Courtois, himself a onetime believer in Marxist-Leninism, has estimated the number of victims of communist rule at 100 million, which means that the hammer and sickle has killed many more people than the swastika. And yet not only do most young people not learn about this horror and evil at high schools or universities, but it’s not uncommon to hear seemingly well-informed academics, politicians, or journalists to naively romanticize communism. Note, for example, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who rather than being grateful for never having to live under communist rule has only praised Cuba’s butcher Fidel Castro. On today’s solemn anniversary I have compiled a list of some of the best books and films on the subject so that you can learn more about the tragic fruits of Marxism-Leninism.

A helpful, quick introduction to the history of communist oppression is Communism: A History by Richard Pipes, one of the most accomplished historians of Russia in the West. Prof. Pipes served as President Reagan’s advisor on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Pipes publicly sparred with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, easily the best known dissident from behind the Iron Curtain, on the relationship between Russia’s political culture and the nature of the Soviet regime. Regardless, both Pipes and Solzhenitsyn are worth reading. A good introduction to the latter is the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set amidst the cold, hungry misery of the gulags where inmates anxiously await their ten-year sentences to end, only to have more ten-year sentences slapped on them. One Day’s significance extends far beyond its Soviet setting and is a reflection on man’s cruelty under extreme conditions.

Another canonical novel about Stalinism is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It tells the story of Rubashov, an old Bolshevik unfailing in his belief in communism who is unexpectedly imprisoned and tortured in the lead up to a show trial. While Rubashov is a fictional character, there were many real life Rubashovs whose orthodox belief in the Soviet state did not save them from falling victim to Stalin’s paranoia.

Communism as an ideology was based on anthropological lies, and it forced people into lying to survive. Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel’s classic essay The Power of the Powerless is the best known take on this theme, using the memorable image of the green grocer who places a placard reading Workers of the World, Unite! in his window. The green grocer does not believe in this slogan; whether he does or not is irrelevant, because he has to display a slogan he potentially rejects in order to not be harassed by the state. A much less known, but equally powerful work dealing with communism’s inherent dishonesty is Leopold Tyrmand’s The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Collective: A Primer on Communist Civilization. Tyrmand left his native Poland in the 1960s and arrived in the United States, where he was shocked to see a large part of the intellectual elites harbor naïve illusions about communism. He wrote this book to explain communism from an insider’s perspective to Americans blessed to live in a free country.

While the number of infamous crimes wrought by communism is too long to be listed in this article, one that undoubtedly deserves mention is the Holodomor. In 1932-1933, Stalin starved to death at least four million (some estimates go much higher) Ukrainian peasants in order to wipe out political dissent after they resisted the collectivization of agriculture. Ukraine’s Black Earth region boasts of the most fertile soil in Europe, which would make a famine unlikely under natural circumstances, but Stalin deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians by sending officials to seize their wheat. The fact that Microsoft Word underlines “Holodomor” in red as I write this shows how relatively little known this tragedy, undoubtedly one of the biggest mass murders in European history, is. A good primer on the Holodomor is Harvest of Sorrow by the late British Sovietologist Robert Conquest.

No communist leader has enjoyed such a positive image in the mainstream media (one that many democratically elected officials would likely envy) as Fidel Castro. Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova has written a fine book that deconstructs the myth of Fidel as a cool ladies’ man and ardent critic of American imperialism whose heart is always on the side of the poor. Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant engagingly shows how prior to 1959 Cuba, despite all its troubles, was one of the most prosperous societies in the Americas, yet as a result of Castro’s destructive rule, marked by death squads, growing poverty, and prison camps with appalling conditions, thousands of Cubans risk their lives floating on inner tubes in shark-infested waters to escape to Florida each year and Cuban political prisoners inject themselves with the HIV virus to shorten their misery. Fontova’s book is impossible to put down and, despite the grim subject matter, is replete with sarcastic humor that will have you laughing out loud. Fontova’s Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him is equally enthralling.

Chairman Mao, who was the de facto ruler of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976, holds the unenviable record of being the twentieth century’s biggest butcher. Historians estimate that he killed up to 70 million of mostly his own people, far more than Stalin and Hitler combined, during peacetime. And yet there was a time when Mao’s Little Red Book was a trendy fashion accessory at Berkeley and in many Left Bank Parisian cafes. A fascinating chronicle of Mao’s rise to power from an undistinguished, eccentric schoolteacher to becoming history’s biggest psychopathic mass murderer thanks to the Kremlin’s support is Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story.

In addition to these books, there are also many excellent films about communism. Latvian director Edvins Snore’s documentary The Soviet Story, which includes interviews with many esteemed historians and former Soviet dissidents such as Vladimir Bukovsky, begins by showing young, clueless hipsters parading around in T-shirts with the hammer and sickle. By the end of the film, anyone who ever entertained the idea of buying such a shirt will undoubtedly be burning with embarrassment.

One of the best dramas about communism is the 2006 German film The Lives of Others, which received a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Lives of Others depicts the Stasi, East Germany’s secret intelligence agency. The film painfully and memorably depicts the humiliating tortures of the Stasi.

The late Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda directed numerous films about communism. Two deserve special note. One is 2007’s Oscar-nominated Katyn, about the Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish reserve officers (among them Wajda’s father). The Soviets falsely blamed the Germans for this crime for almost half a century. The film is less about the murder of the Polish officers itself and more about how totalitarian regimes function on the basis of blatant lies. Wajda’s last film, last year’s Afterimage, depicts the real-life story of Polish modernist painter Władysław Strzemiński, a lifelong communist who fell out of favor with Poland’s Stalinist government for believing that art should depict one’s subjective sensory experience rather than have an obligatory political undertone. Afterimage is a sad film, showing how Strzemiński’s resistance to socialist realism led the regime to throw him out of the artists’ union and prohibit him from buying paint and eventually food. Hungry and abandoned, Strzemiński died of untreated tuberculosis.

More lighthearted is Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball. While Forman later gained fame in the United States for directing such masterpieces as Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he was one of the leading stars of Czechoslovak New Wave in his native country. The sardonic Firemen’s Ball shows the party firefighters throw for their colleague’s eighty-sixth birthday. The party is a disaster and a microcosm showing the absurdity of communism, a political system that forces people to steal, that presents ugliness as beauty, and that ultimately brings about its own destruction.

Many great books and films have been made about communism, which in terms of absolute numbers is the most murderous ideology in human history. Hopefully, this reading and viewing list will show you its dark side, which most liberal arts professors conveniently ignore.


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About Filip Mazurczak 82 Articles
Filip Mazurczak is a historian, translator, and journalist. His writing has appeared in First Things, the St. Austin Review, the European Conservative, the National Catholic Register, and many others. He teaches at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow.

16 Comments

  1. Oh, how we need more columns like this. There are way too many useful idiots who show their righteousness on their sleeves in their disdain for National Socialism only to bend their knees to Communism.

  2. The rise of socialist views across the globe, is a clear indication that people believe hard work and their needs cannot and will not be met. That society has turned a corner where people no longer have faith in the current systems. We are told get an education it will lead to a better job, that has proven a lie. Follow your dreams and you will be happy, that has proven to be a lie. Do what is right, make good choices and you will be alright, that has proven to be a lie. Socialism allows people to believe that they will be alright, that there is a safety net, some place to rely on when current conventions fail.

    Can anyone explain why a person today who has good work history, an education, good work ethic, cannot seem to “make it” in today’s world? There are millions like this and when society ignores them, they look for alternatives. The death of the middle class is a prime example.

    • The explanation is the (socialist) American Welfare State started by FDR and kicked into high gear by Obama. To understand it we must consider the three “Who”: Who decides (politicians) who pays for it (the middle class) and who benefits from it (poor people who vote for the politicians.) The death of the middle class is certain as politicians give more and more of their money to those who don’t earn it.

  3. My husband had a great interest in Soviet history, especially Gulag memoirs. I recommend his special favorites, INTO THE WHIRLWIND and WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND by Eugenia Ginsburg. Ironically, he’d found the first title in a “militant bookstore” in an infamously lefty college town.The staff can’t have been aware of its content.

  4. Mizoguchi’s “The Human Condition” is 3 films depicting communism in Japan during and after WW 2 and the disillusionment and eventual death of the primary character, played by the great Nakadai Tatsuya. Each film is 3 hours long and one gets a clear picture of not only communism, but also of Japanese society as dominated by the militaristic regime of that time. Zhang Yimou’s “To Live” is a film everyone should see who thinks communism is just great. It portrays decades of life of one family and stars the great Gong Li.

  5. “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl” is a quiet powerhouse about the horrors of communism.
    I will not see it again, it broke my heart.

  6. Breaking Stalin’s Nose, by Eugene Yelchin, was a Newbery Honor Book in 2012 (the Newbery is awarded to distinguished books for children). Given that the American Library Association is essentially far-left, it is surprising, because the book portrays life in the Soviet Union as terrible. There’s a description of the book here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Stalin%27s_Nose The fact that it is a Newbery book means that it is in a lot of libraries, and that there is a good chance that students will read it when they are assigned to read an award-winning book.

    (I’ve just retired as a school librarian, and mercifully so because I am sickened by the ongoing perversion of children’s literature. Book after book trying to normalize two mommies or two daddies, or the-boy-who-used-to-be-a-girl, and so on).

    • Leslie,
      I’m just reading this article & your comments. I’m so sorry. That must have been rough for you.
      I love books & was a huge fan of libraries until recently. The bookmobile used to come once a month to our very rural community & our entire family looked forward to it. We got to know the couple who drove the bookmobile & considered them good friends.
      Back when I attended a one room schoolhouse the bookmobile visited our school & we were only allowed to check out children’s books-no exceptions. That was a public library policy. If you wanted a non-fiction adult book about science, history, etc, your parent would have to check it out for you.
      How times have changed.

  7. I would add to the movies about Communism the 1956 film “The Prisoner,” starring Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins and directed by Peter Glenville. It is a stark film, based on the true story of the psychological torture of Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty by the Communists in Hungary.

  8. It also says something about our education system that fails so miserably in teaching about communism that the youth parade around in Che Guevara t-shirts on their way to vote for Bernie Sanders.

  9. Thank you, CWR, for publishing the truth in this late hour!

    The case against collectivism is not difficult to make.

    Virtue that takes place at the end of a gun is not virtue at all. It is oppression.

    God Himself teaches us this. He does not force his creatures to undertake virtuous acts. We have free will. (Remember the rich young man. Jesus did not force him to forfeit his property, but watched as he walked away.)

    Virtue isn’t even about money or things — and failing to recognize that is leftism’s greatest failing. Virtue is about the free and proper exercise of our wills — and, thus, our becoming one with each other and with Him.

    I deeply wish more Catholic outlets would explore the shortcomings of leftism. How ironic — how moronic! — it would be for America to fall victim to this utterly discredited, totally counter-productive, death-dealing lie generations after its folly was exposed for all the world to see.

  10. I concur with Roberto de Mattei, who called for Nuremberg trials for any surviving Communist leaders. Terrible crimes were committed during communist rule, and after the Berlin Wall came down most of the Communist leaders simply retired without being held accountable for their misdeeds.

    • Good point. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made the same argument regarding the Bolsheviks and their crimes against the Russian people. When evil goes unpunished, it goes underground, only to reappear later in an even worse form. What does “worse than Stalin” look like? I shudder to think about it.

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