THE TERRIBLE DEAD OF KARL MARX IN History 1883:

THE TERRIBLE DEAD OF KARL MARX IN History 1883: 

He was most remembered for “The Communist Manifesto,” which, in 1917, became the foundation of the Soviet Union: the UnitedStates’ColdWar adversary and one of the 20th Century’s most notorious regimes.

Published in 1848, the Communist Manifesto proposed a classless society by abolishing private property and giving a central authority ownership of the economy.

Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, studied Marx and, after taking power, implemented communist policies.

But the country erupted into civil war, and—at the urging of Joseph Stalin—Lenin’s secret police carried out the “Red Terror”: the imprisonment, torture, & execution of hundreds of thousands of people deemed class enemies. 

After the Communists consolidated power in 1922, the Soviet Union was created, spreading fear across Europe and North America.

This was most evident in Germany, where the Nazi Party recast communism as a Jewish threat to the German race. 

The US allied with the USSR to fight the Nazis in WW2. But following the war, it separated itself from Stalin and his violent enforcement of communism.

After Lenin's death, Stalin had more than a million people executed to fortify his power, including a third of the Communist Party.

  He also abandoned Marx’s vision of workers’ rights, instead sending laborers—who could not meet outrageous quotas—to forced labor camps.

During his despotic reign, Stalin is estimated to have killed at least 15 million people.

America’s desire to contain Soviet communism played out, at home, in congressional investigations into alleged government infiltration, and abroad, as satellite nations became battlefields in the struggle between Democracy & communism. 

In the end, Democracy prevailed while the Soviet Union—unable to strengthen its economy or implement lasting political reforms—collapsed. ​