Communist Military Machine

Hostility between the West and the communist world is such an accepted part of modern life that it is all too easy to forget that in 1939 the Soviet Union was the world’s only communist state and that the Soviet Union was then seemingly riven by purges and economic troubles and threatened abroad by the ravening power of Nazi Germany.

Today the Soviet Union is master of the eastern half of Europe; China, the world’s most populous country, is also communist and there are communist or single-party socialist states in central America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The rise of communism began with the victories of the Red Army in World War II and the establishment of “people’s democracies” in eastern Europe which quickly followed. The success of the Chinese communists in 1948 confirmed in many Western eyes the existence of a worldwide communist conspiracy, setting the stage for the Cold War confrontations of the fifties.

The Korean War was fought to halt the expansion of this communist monolith, but there were soon signs of disharmony within the communist bloc as was seen in the growing independence of Yugoslavia and the Chinese-Soviet split. Such Dissent continues to the present day as persistent Sino-Soviet disputes and the efforts of Solidarity in Poland show.

The Vietnam War, the Cuban intervention in Angola and the invasion of Afghanistan are examples of communist initiatives of the sixties and more recent times but in the same period Soviet missiles have been kept out of Cuba, a socialist government in Chile has been overthrown and Egypt has been weaned away from being a Soviet client.

Despite this mixed record of success and failure, the overall trend of expansion is clear. Communist forces and influence have been responsible for many of the most important changes that have taken place around the world since the start of World War II. The renewed Cold War and heightened arms race of the eighties make it all the more urgent to understand communism’s successes and its failures throughout the period since these have shaped the modern world and created many of its problems.

The authors’ authoritative and highly-readable text is complemented by some 250 carefully chosen illustrations, many of them in color, which combine to make Communist Military Machine a book no student of recent history or military affairs will want to be without.