Life under communist rule often mixed strict political control with propaganda, surveillance, unusual policies, resistance, and moments of unexpected absurdity. These 30 stories explore how communist movements and governments shaped everyday life, conflict, and political power across different countries.
Sandpaper Book Cover
1. Guy Debord, the French Marxist philosopher, bound his first book, “Mémoires,” with a sandpaper cover so it would damage other books placed beside it.
2. The Pixar film Coco, which includes the spirits of dead family members, passed through China’s censors with 0 cuts. In China, superstition is taboo because of the belief that spiritual forces could weaken people’s faith in the communist party. The censors were so moved by the film that they gave it a full pass.
3. During the Chinese cultural revolution, the communist party attempted to alter traffic laws so that red, the color of communism, signified “go” and green signified “stop.” Poor party planning caused a huge rise in accidents, and the initiative was withdrawn.
4. Ho Chi Minh, who led the Communist Party in North Vietnam, briefly worked as a pastry chef at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, the same hotel where Malcolm X worked in the 1940s as a busboy.
5. In 1972, Hans Beierlein, a West German businessman, bought the international rights to the Marxist anthem “The Internationale,” which was still under copyright. The government of East Germany agreed to pay him royalties for using the song.
6. Among the 10,000 members of the Communist Party USA in 1957, 1,500 were FBI informants.
7. To combat a communist insurgency in the Philippines, a CIA operative would drain the blood from captured enemy soldiers through two holes in their neck and leave the corpse to be found in order to spread rumors of vampire (aswang) attacks.
8. The Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada has not been able to win a single seat in the Canadian Parliament, even though it has run candidates in every election since 1974.
9. In 1946, the Communist Party of China was nearing defeat in the Chinese civil war and likely would have lost the war, but Americans persuaded the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) to stop fighting to prevent an all-out civil war. As a result, the Communists regained their strength and won the war.
10. During the Bodo League Massacre of 1950, the South Korean government killed more than 100,000 suspected communists. US, Australian, and British officials witnessed and photographed the political genocide.
X-Rays Forcing Cancer
11. Secret police in Communist Romania gave the leaders of a 1977 coal miners’ strike 5-minute chest X-rays to make sure they developed cancer.
12. Of the 139 members elected to the 1934 USSR Central Committee of the Communist Party at the 17th Congress, Stalin had 98 executed. Of 1,996 party members present, 1,108 were arrested, and about two-thirds of those executed. Thus it was given the name “The Congress of the Condemned.”
13. The Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands (MLPN) was a phony pro-China communist party in the Netherlands created by the Dutch secret service BVD to build contacts with the Chinese government for espionage purposes.
14. Mengistu, the brutal communist dictator of Ethiopia, who had thousands of people executed and may have personally murdered Emperor Haile Selassie, is alive and well under asylum in Zimbabwe.
15. In the late 1980s, young punk rockers in Cuba, known as “Los Frikis,” were so tired of the stifling life of the communist regime that they decided to inject themselves with the AIDS virus so they could live in a sanitarium and be free from constant police-state harassment.
16. The Indonesian Communist Party was once the largest non-governing Communist Party in the world and was effectively dissolved through a US-supported mass killing of 500,000 of its members.
17. During the “Red Terror” of 1918, Communist secret police in Orel (in Russia) “poured water on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues.” In Ukraine, they “rolled people around in barrels studded internally with nails.” Upwards of 1 million people died.
18. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia wanted to build a state-of-the-art subway network with better trains, but the Soviet Union forced them to use their old, inefficient train designs for the benefit of the Soviet Economy.
19. Canada had a top-secret list of suspected Communists they intended to detain indefinitely. If they tried to escape, they would be shot. One of the people on that list was Tommy Douglas, the founder of the current Healthcare and CPP programs.
20. In 1991, a fake Russian TV program on Leningrad TV convinced many citizens that Lenin consumed a lot of psychedelic mushrooms, eventually even becoming a mushroom himself. The Leningrad communist party had to declare that “Lenin could not have been a mushroom” because “a mammal cannot be a plant.”
Yang’s Regret Over Crackdown
21. Former Chinese President Yang Shangkun told his doctor before his death that the crackdown on June 4 (Tiananmen Square) had been the Communist Party’s “most serious mistake in its history, a mistake he couldn’t correct but which would eventually be corrected.” He had first opposed using force against students.
22. In 1925, Bulgarian communists killed a general to bring the government together in the church, then set off a bomb inside it, killing 150 and injuring 500. The king survived because he was late, after attending the funeral of another general who was killed in an attempt on the king’s life.
23. Bob Marley wrote a song called “Zimbabwe” in support of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist guerillas fighting against the Rhodesian government. After Robert Mugabe became the leader of the new country of Zimbabwe, Marley was invited to perform at the country’s independence celebrations.
24. During the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” of 1956, China let people speak freely and openly share their views on the communist regime. After a year, the campaign was withdrawn and the Chinese government imprisoned those who spoke critically about them.
25. When the Monopoly game was introduced to communist Czechoslovakia, private businesses were illegal and mortgages didn’t exist, so they turned it into a horse racing variant.
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