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This was very interesting. At times the author treated the uneducated people who strived to raise their social status through communism with condescension. Saying that some people were promoted past their knowledge and talents was redundant. Monied people are also promoted in error😳.The bits about the Polish Home Army and the clergy were packed with insight. Communism in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslavakia, and Poland is described in depth.

Does what it says on the tin, taking us from 1917 to 1928, although the author did sometimes overwhelm me with statistics.

#teaandabook

Slezkine introduces the reader into the homes and histories of the families living in the House of Government. Their fanatic idealism, close, almost familial, ties to their fellow political revolutionaries is as inspiring as it is melancholy as their friends were behind their downfall and/or death.It is with astonishing to realize many of those who lost everything still considered Stalin their friend and savior. the font is almost painful to read.

3.5 Stars: Rating based on introduction and not actual manifesto. 80%+ is commentary on the (surprising to me) short manifesto by Marx. I found the introduction informative and it gave good backstory to what lead up to Marx‘s writing.

I listened to the audiobook of Red Scare and found it really captivating. The story goes far beyond the grandstanding McCarthy Senate hearings; so many careers and lives were ruined by anti-communist fervor and by the parallel investigations of the Lavender Scare, by Hollywood's rapid capitulation, and by the slightest association with labor or civil rights groups labeled communist-adjacent. The echoes with our own turbulent times are unmistakable

In capitalism, people claimed to be free and equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available.....
'Do you remember Black Boy?' teacher Nora asked when we read Richard Wright's autobiography in school. 'In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a poor black person cannot be free. The police are after him. The law works against him.'

3.5 ⭐️

If you have lived through a few decades, then you know that for some reason, the past repeats itself. During the 1940s and 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, America became a country scared of communism. WWII had just ended, and the USSR (as Russia was known then) was taking over Eastern Europe, the Keoran War had started, and there was a move to take over China, it was the perfect storm for the Red Scare. The government got ⬇️

Recent acquisitions:

📖 Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin
📖 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder