Communism

Hammer and sickle on a red flag

Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?

Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower

Nixon in China: the trip that changed the Cold War.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution: everything you wanted to know.

History's greatest mysteriesWhy did Mao’s chosen successor flee China?.

Living through the fall of communism.

How a ballerina survived the Gulag.

Nikita Khrushchev visits President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1964

Snuffed out democracies and poisoned toothpaste: how the Cold War wreaked havoc in post-colonial Africa

Are revolutions doomed to failure?.

The Cold War battle for Berlin.

The trials of Ethel Rosenberg.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov

Vladimir Lenin and his lust for power

Chaos & communism: China’s 1949 revolution.

The Russian revolution: everything you wanted to know.

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know

A ‘Trabi’ – the classic East German Trabant 601 car

The cost of unity: Ian Kershaw on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

How is the image of revolutionary Che Guevara commodified? Alex von Tunzelmann explores. (Photo by Francois ANCELLET/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Che Guevara: face of the revolution.

Your guide to Karl Marx: who was he, what was the Communist Manifesto and why is he important?

Illustration by Davide Bonazzi.

Did the Cold War ever really end?

The LibraryKarl Marx: the godfather of revolution.

Benjamin Tillett, organiser of the Docker's Union and leader of the London Transport Worker's strike in 1911, addressing a rally of the strikers. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

The essay: Britain’s cautious revolutionaries.

Bowie’s Berlin: the city that shaped a 1970s masterpiece.

Children at the Berlin Wall on Sebastianstrasse, Berlin - Kreuzberg - in around 1964. (Photo by Lehnartz/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

The secret history of the Berlin Wall

Striking workers carry banners through the streets of Petrograd (St Petersburg) at the start of the February Revolution that brought the fall of the Russian monarchy the next month. (Getty Images)

Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, depicted in an undated Communist poster. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The red dawn: the October Revolution.

British prime minister Clement Attlee reading a document in his office, 27 July 1946. (Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Attlee’s secret war with Stalin.

A Calcutta pavement, c1961

After Partition: colony politics and the rise of communism in Bengal.

Armoured cars unloaded in Shanghai in 1927

China’s public image war.

Cuban photographer Alberto Korda

Q&AWhere did the famous portrait of Che Guevara come from?.

The 19th-century political and social theorist Karl Marx; co-author (with Friedrich Engels) of The Communist Manifesto (1848). (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

My history hero: Karl Marx (1818–83).