the war communism essay

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War Communism

War Communism was the name given to the economic system that existed in Russia from 1918 to 1921. War Communism was introduced by Lenin to combat the economic problems brought on by the civil war in Russia. It was a combination of emergency measures and socialist dogma.

One of the first measures of War Communism was the nationalisation of land . Banks and shipping were also nationalised and foreign trade was declared a state monopoly. This was the response when Lenin realised that the Bolsheviks were simply unprepared to take over the whole economic system of Russia. Lenin stressed the importance of the workers showing discipline and a will to work hard if the revolution was to survive. There were those in the Bolshevik hierarchy who wanted factory managers removed and the workers to take over the factories for themselves but on behalf of the people. It was felt that the workers would work better if they believed they were working for a cause as opposed to a system that made some rich but many poor. The civil war had made many in the Bolsheviks even more class antagonistic, as there were many of the old guard who were fighting to destroy the Bolsheviks.

On June 28th, 1918, a decree was passed that ended all forms of private capitalism. Many large factories were taken over by the state and on November 29th, 1920, any factory/industry that employed over 10 workers was nationalised.

War Communism also took control of the distribution of food. The Food Commissariat was set up to carry out this task. All co-operatives were fused together under this Commissariat.

War Communism had six principles:

1)   Production should be run by the state. Private ownership should be kept to the minimum. Private houses were to be confiscated by the state.

2)   State control was to be granted over the labour of every citizen. Once a military army had served its purpose, it would become a labour army.

3)   The state should produce everything in its own undertakings. The state tried to control the activities of millions of peasants.

4)   Extreme centralisation was introduced. The economic life of the area controlled by the Bolsheviks was put into the hands of just a few organisations. The most important one was the Supreme Economic Council. This had the right to confiscate and requisition. The speciality of the SEC was the management of industry. Over 40 head departments (known as glavki) were set up to accomplish this. One glavki could be responsible for thousands of factories. This frequently resulted in chronic inefficiency. The Commissariat of Transport controlled the railways. The Commissariat of Agriculture controlled what the peasants did.

5)   The state attempted to become the soul distributor as well as the sole producer. The Commissariats took what they needed to meet demands. The people were divided into four categories – manual workers in harmful trades, workers who performed hard physical labour, workers in light tasks/housewives and professional people. Food was distributed on a 4:3:2:1 ratio. Though the manual class was the favoured class, it still received little food. Many in the professional class simply starved. It is believed that about 0% of all food consumed came from an illegal source. On July 20th 1918, the Bolsheviks decided that all surplus food had to be surrendered to the state. This led to an increase in the supply of grain to the state. From 1917 to 1928, about ¾ million ton was collected by the state. In 1920 to 1921, this had risen to about 6 million tons. However, the policy of having to hand over surplus food caused huge resentment in the countryside, especially as Lenin had promised “all land to the people” pre-November 1917. While the peasants had the land, they had not been made aware that they would have to hand over any extra food they produced from their land. Even the extra could not meet demand. In 1933, 25 million tons of grain was collected and this only just met demand.

6)   War Communism attempted to abolish money as a means of exchange. The Bolsheviks wanted to go over to a system of a natural economy in which all transactions were carried out in kind. Effectively, bartering would be introduced. By 1921, the value of the rouble had dropped massively and inflation had markedly increased. The government’s revenue raising ability was chronically poor, as it had abolished most taxes. The only tax allowed was the ‘Extraordinary Revolutionary Tax’, which was targeted at the rich and not the workers.

War Communism was a disaster. In all areas, the economic strength of Russia fell below the 1914 level. Peasant farmers only grew for themselves, as they knew that any extra would be taken by the state. Therefore, the industrial cities were starved of food despite the introduction of the 4:3:2:1 ratio. A bad harvest could be disastrous for the countryside – and even worse for cities. Malnutrition was common, as was disease. Those in the cities believed that their only hope was to move out to the countryside and grow food for themselves. Between 1916 and 1920, the cities of northern and central Russia lost 33% of their population to the countryside. Under War Communism, the number of those working in the factories and mines dropped by 50%.

In the cities, private trade was illegal, but more people were engaged in this than at any other time in Russia’s history. Large factories became paralysed through lack of fuel and skilled labour.

Small factories were in 1920 producing just 43% of their 1913 total. Large factories were producing 18% of their 1913 figure. Coal production was at 27% of its 1913 figure in 1920. With little food to nourish them, it could not be expected that the workers could work effectively. By 1920, the average worker had a productivity rate that was 44% less than the 1913 figure.

Even if anything of value could be produced, the ability to move it around Russia was limited. By the end of 1918, Russia’s rail system was in chaos.

In the countryside, most land was used for the growth of food. Crops such as flax and cotton simply were not grown. Between 1913 and 1920, there was an 87% drop in the number of acres given over to cotton production. Therefore, those factories producing cotton related products were starved of the most basic commodity they needed.

How did the people react to War Communism? Within the cities, many were convinced that their leaders were right and the failings being experienced were the fault of the Whites and international capitalists. There were few strikes during War Communism – though Lenin was quick to have anyone arrested who seemed to be a potential cause of trouble. Those in Bolshevik held territory were also keen to see a Bolshevik victory in the civil war, so they were prepared to do what was necessary. The alternate – a White victory – was unthinkable.

Also the Bolshevik hierarchy could blame a lot of Russia’s troubles on the Whites as they controlled the areas, which would have supplied the factories with produce. The Urals provided Petrograd and Tula with coal and iron for their factories. The Urals was completely separated from Bolshevik Russia from the spring of 1918 to November 1919. Oil fields were in the hands of the Whites. Also the Bolshevik’s Red Army took up the majority of whatever supplies there were in their fight against the Whites.

No foreign country was prepared to trade with the Russia controlled by the Bolsheviks, so foreign trade ceased to exist. Between 1918 and November 1920, the Allies formally blockaded Russia.

The harshness of War Communism could be justified whilst the civil war was going on. When it had finished, there could be no such justification. There were violent rebellions in Tambov and in Siberia. The sailors in Kronstadt mutinied. Lenin faced the very real risk of an uprising of workers and peasants and he needed to show the type of approach to the problem that the tsarist regime was incapable of doing. In February 1921, Lenin had decided to do away with War Communism and replace it with a completely different system – the New Economic Policy . This was put to the 10th Party Conference in March and accepted. War Communism was swept away. During War Communism, the people had no incentive to produce as money had been abolished. They did what needed to be done because of the civil war, but once this had ended Lenin could not use it as an excuse any longer.

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• 20th Century

War Communism: Lenin’s Plan to Bolster the Red Army

Lucy Davidson

21 jan 2022, @lucejuiceluce.

From 1918 to 1921, Russia was embroiled in a Civil War, fought between the Bolsheviks’ Red Army and their various enemies, known collectively as the White Army. To sustain the Bolshevik war effort, Vladimir Lenin introduced the economic policy of ‘war communism’, which involved nationalising industrial output, banning private enterprise and requisitioning surplus grain.

Ultimately, the Bolsheviks won the war. But by the time war communism came to an end 2 years after its conception, the policy had caused Russia’s industrial output to plummet, the collapse of the ruble and millions of famine-related deaths. It was replaced with the New Economic Policy in 1921.

But how exactly did war communism work, and what were its aims? Here’s the history of war communism during the Russian Civil War.

The aims of war communism are debated

War communism included the following policies:

• Nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict centralised management
• State control of foreign trade
• Strict discipline for workers, with strikes forbidden
• Obligatory labour duty by non-working classes (“militarisation of labour”, including an early version of the Gulag)
• Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surplus (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralised distribution among the remaining population
• Rationing of food and most commodities, with centralised distribution in urban centres
• Private enterprise banned
• Military-style control of the railways

Though these measures may appear coherent, the government implemented them during a time of civil war, with the result being that the policies were often poorly-coordinated, if at all. Large areas of Russia were outside of Bolshevik control, while poor communications from Moscow meant that even those loyal to the government often had to act individually.

Distributing fuel rations on 5 January 1921.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Many have argued that war communism didn’t represent an actual economic policy, and instead was a set of measures intended to win the civil war.

Indeed, though war communism proved successful in achieving its primary purpose – aiding the Red Army in halting the advance of the White Army , and reclaiming most of the territory of the former Russian Empire – the economic strength of Russia in all areas fell below the 1914 level. War communism turned into a disaster.

Famine was widespread

Peasant farmers knew that any excess crops would be seized by the state, so grew only for themselves. People in the countryside refused to co-operate in giving food for the war effort, while bad harvests compounded the hardships that the war caused. Malnutrition and disease were common.

‘Famine’ by Ivan Vladimirov (1870-1947).

The result was that industrial cities were starved of food, and workers started moving to the countryside to grow their own food, which further decreased the possibility of barter of industrial goods for food and worsened the plight of the remaining urban population.

Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd lost 70% of its population, while Moscow lost over 50% and the number working in factories and mines dropped by 50%. In total, in those 2 years, Russia lost 33% of its urban population to the countryside.

Moreover, most countryside lands were used for the growth of food at the time, meaning crops such as cotton and flax weren’t favoured. Without the necessary supply, factories in urban centres were deprived of basic manufacturing commodities.

In all, food requisitioning combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought contributed to a devastating famine that caused a staggering 3-10 million deaths.

Strikes and rebellions broke out

Worker and peasant strikes and rebellions broke out across the country. The Kronstadt Rebellion of March 1921 particularly startled Lenin , who regarded the sailors there as the ‘reddest of the reds’. These uprisings were of further concern since they were led by opportunist leftists, which created competition with the Bolsheviks.

Suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny. Soldiers of the Red Army attack the island fortress of Kronstadt on the ice of the Gulf of Finland.

In February 1921, the Communist Party’s secret police, the Cheka , reported 118 peasant uprisings. In spite of these protests, the Russian government actually suffered relatively few effective or potentially disruptive uprisings while implementing its policy of war communism.

A black market emerged

The ruble collapsed, meaning that barter increasingly replaced money as a medium of exchange, and 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. A black market emerged, in spite of the threat of martial law against profiteering.

Though also illegal, private trade became commonplace, and more people were engaged in it than during any other time in Russia’s history. Above board, by 1920 the average worker had a productivity rate that was around 44% less than the 1913 figure.

The strangulation on goods and money was exacerbated by a disastrous rail system, which, by the end of 1918, meant that it was difficult to transport anything of value across Russia.

Attitudes towards the government differed

Within urban areas, many were convinced that their leaders were right and the collective failure of the system was the fault of the White Army . It was also easy to blame international capitalists, since no foreign country was prepared to trade with a Bolshevik-run Russia, and between 1918 and November 1920, the Allies formally blockaded Russia.

Many in Bolshevik territories were genuinely keen to see a Bolshevik civil war victory, so were prepared to do whatever was necessary to avoid a White Army victory.

A Bolshevik requisitioning brigade on 6 January 1921.

The Bolsheviks were also able to blame a lot of Russia’s troubles on the Whites as they controlled the areas which would have supplied the factories with produce. The Urals, which normally provided Petrograd and Tula with coal and iron, were cut off from Bolshevik Russia from spring 1918 to November 1919.

Similarly, oil fields were in the hands of the Whites, while the Bolsheviks’ Red Army took the majority of supplies in their fight against them.

Lenin put a stop to war communism

While the civil war raged, the harshness of war communism was, in the eyes of Russia’s rulers, justifiable. When it had finished, there was no such justification, and a government claiming to represent the people now found itself on the verge of being overthrown by the workers it purported to serve.

The crisis undermined widespread loyalty to the government: Lenin needed to take decisive action. In February 1921, Lenin replaced war communism with his New Economic Policy , which he characterised as comprising of “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control”.

The incentive to produce for money was re-introduced, and the horrors of years of war communism were consigned to history.

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3 (page 72) p. 72 War Communism

• Published: February 2002
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The October revolution was followed by deep economic collapse. To mobilize the battered forces of industry and agriculture to meet the needs of war, the Bolsheviks set in place the policies that were later termed ‘War Communism’. ‘War Communism’ examines how far the Bolsheviks were able to impose state regulation on the economy along socialist lines and their achievements and failures. From the beginning, they were beset with problems in terms of industrial productivity and supply. The most critical problem was that of food supply. This led to the breakdown of urban life which caused civil war. The civil war saw the hardening conviction that the state was the modality through which socialism would be built.

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War Communism, 1918-1921

• ❖ The economy had collapsed due to the disruption caused by the First World War and the civil war, and the Bolsheviks needed a way to deal with the shortages of food and goods.
• ❖ War Communism as a policy seemed to fit the communist theory as no one individual made a profit from their labour, the state controlled the means of production (the factories), and the state distributed produce according to the needs of the individual.
• ❖ The peasants were seen as resisting the Bolsheviks by not supplying enough food for the cities, towns and the Red Army.
• ❖ The policy would ensure that the Red Army was supplied to fight in the civil war.
• ❖ To gain control of the economy to enable them to win the war.
• ❖ To ensure enough supplies to resource the Red Army.
• ❖ To increase the Communist Party's control of the country.
• ❖ All industries were nationalised under the control of the Supreme Council of the Economy, or Vesenkha, in December 1917. Factories were set production targets.
• ❖ Military-style discipline was brought into the factories, which meant strikes were banned and there were harsh labour laws.
• ❖ Food rationing was introduced. Soldiers got the most, then workers, while the bourgeois and clergy received the least.
• ❖ Forced requisitioning of agricultural produce by 150,000 Bolsheviks . There was strict price controls on all agricultural produce.
• ❖ All private trade was banned.
• ❖ They were able to supply and feed the Red Army during the civil war which helped them to defeat the Whites and the Greens.
• ❖ They were able to centralise their control of the economy.
• ❖ Production levels collapsed even more. For example, coal production was 29 million tons in 1913 but by 1921 it was only 9 million.
• ❖ Food production collapsed to 48% of the 1913 productions levels. In 1913, 80 million tons of grain had been produced but in 1921, it was 37.6 million.
• ❖ There was an increase in violence and unrest in the countryside as peasants resisted food requisitioning. They hid their grain and slaughtered their animals rather than handing them over to the Bolsheviks .
• ❖ By 1921, some regions faced famine . 29 million experienced famine and 5 million died.
• ❖ Workers from the cities and towns migrated to the countryside in search of food because there was less food in the towns.
• ❖ It resulted in peasant uprisings in 1920 and 1921, including the Tambov Uprising , and the Kronstadt Uprising by sailors in March 1921.
• ❖ A black market developed because of the shortages in goods and food.

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History Grade 11 - Topic 1 Essay Questions

Explain to what extent Stalin succeeded in transforming Russia into a superpower by 1939.

Stalin came to power on the back of Lenin’s death in 1925, after which he instituted a range of far-reaching policy changes that would alter the course of Russian society and politics for the rest of the 20th century. The communist Soviet Union we now remember was the product of Stalin, although it can be argued that Lenin was responsible for laying the foundations of its highly authoritarian political culture. The new Russia under Stalin was supposed to radically break from the economic and social backwardness that characterised the Tsarist regime, and which Lenin had little time to achieve. In many ways, Stalin did create a completely different Russia, one almost unrecognisable from before the October revolution which overthrew the provisional government. However, whether that translated into it being a superpower is quite another thing. This paper will argue that although momentous and radical, the reforms Stalin instituted did not transform Russia into a superpower by 1939, although it did lay the framework for such a status to be attained during the post-WWII era.

Stalin rose to power as the leader of the Soviet Union by crushing his opposition in the Central Committee led by Leon Trotsky. Although we shall not detail this complicated political battle, it is important to note that the vying for power between the powerful figures was also a contestation over the ideological and policy framework which the Soviet Union should take. By the late 1920s, Stalin had emerged victorious, and went on to institute his own brand of communism in the Soviet Union. This centred on the notion of ‘Socialism in one Country’, which was ideally to build up the “industrial base and military might of the Soviet Union before exporting revolution abroad.” [1] This was in contrast to earlier pronouncements made by Lenin and Trotsky, which indicated the need to establish a worldwide ‘uninterrupted revolution’ of workers. [2] The logic here was that socialism could never survive independently outside of a socialist world order; Stalin, on the other hand, saw a national socialism – which, ironically, would be compared to Nazism – as the only way for socialism to survive. [3]

The practical effects of Stalin’s socialism in one country was the rescindment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) – which had allowed for small-scale capitalist enterprise to operate – the collectivisation of agriculture, and rapid forced industrialisation. [4] Socialism in one country forced the Soviet Union to look inwards, to create a socialist nation whose lessons and ideas could then be exported overseas. This means that, for all practical purposes, Russia was not interested in attaining any overtly ‘superpower’ status in global politics. It meant, in terms of foreign policy, of “putting the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the interests of the international communist movement.” [5] Ideally, when Russia became powerful enough, it would then ferment for workers’ revolutions the world over.

The costs and benefits of these sweeping policy changes – which essentially closed off the Soviet Union from the outside world – are difficult to determine. On the one hand, they certainly led to large-scale industrialisation which outstripped the pace of Russia’s Western counterparts. Through the policy instrument of Five-Year Plans, which set production targets for industries and farms, Stalin was able to bring Russia up to date with modern heavy-industry production techniques and increase output exponentially. For example, cast iron production increased 439% in ten years, and coal extraction 361%. [6] Russia also went on an extensive electrification programme, called GOELRO, which increased electricity production from 1.9 billion kWh in 1913 to 48 billion kWh in 1940. [7]

However, despite the resounding success with which certain - especially heavy - industries benefitted from forced industrialisation, many other industries and rural farmers often suffered. Because of the focus on heavy industrialisation, lighter industries that catered for consumer goods were often poorly made and faced shortages. The agricultural collectivisation programme which was conducted with increased inflexibility and violence across the Russian hinterland cost the lives of millions of peasants, who died of hunger resulting from famine caused by the upheaval of forced collectivisation. Figures range from 5.6 million to 13.4 million. [8] Millions of other prosperous peasants – known as Kulaks – were sent to gulag camps in Siberia for work; Molotov suggested that between 1.3 and 1.5 kulak households (accounting for between 6 and 7 million persons) were expropriated. [9] Thus, whilst Stalin broke the back of these peasants – by 1941, 97% of agriculture was conducted in collectives, and finally there was enough food to feed the cities – the human cost remains an ever-contested aspect of this period.

What is clear about this period, is that these policies centralised the economy and political power in Russia in Stalin’s hands. The increased industrial output, and the ability for (eventual) increased agricultural production to feed the cities, allowed Russia a certain amount of confidence in its ability to conduct itself as an industrial nation. As Stalin was once quoted as saying, “We are fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.” [10] Thus, one of the primary reasons for industrialisation was for the ability for Russia to protect itself. This fits in well with the overall ideological implication of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’, which advocated for an insular reading of socialism that would allow for ‘proper’ socialist conditions to be reached within the massive country before a worldwide socialist revolution took place.

And in many ways, the industrial capacity generated during Stalin’s leadership up to 1939 was crucial for Russia to defend itself against Germany in 1941. Not only did allow for the production of millions of armaments and supplies crucial to the success of any armed conflict, but it also laid the groundwork for a post-war reconstruction. Because the Soviet Union boasted such impressive industrial capacity, it could rebuild after WWII much easier – and more importantly, without the help of aid from the West, especially the USA. The Marshall Plan, in which the USA loaned $15 billion to European countries to help rebuild industry and cities after their decimation during the second world war, was largely a strategic move to counter the spread of communism in Europe. [11] The spread of Russian influence into eastern Europe, on the other hand, was premised on its industrial power, which resulted in its alternative to the Marshall Plan - namely the Molotov Plan - which extended aid to socialist regimes in central and eastern Europe. [12]

The success of Russian industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation during the pre-war years allowed for the repel of German forces and the extension of Russian influence into the eastern European region. It was then that Russia became a superpower. In fact, it is only during the post-WWII war era when the notion of an international ‘superpower’ becomes widespread, when the cold war divides the world into two ideologically opposed sides – America on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other. [13] One could thus argue that the relative military strength of Russia after WWII, a result of its impressive industrial capacity – and its focus on heavy industry and agricultural production – meant that it could become a superpower. Thus, although no one would suggest that Russia was a superpower before WWII in 1939, its ability to retain its industrial strength after the war meant that it would become one. In conclusion, although Stalin did not transform Russia into a superpower by 1939, he laid the necessary groundwork for that to occur in the post-war era.

This content was originally produced for the SAHO classroom by Sebastian Moronell, Ayabulela Ntwakumba, Simone van der Colff & Thandile Xesi.

[1] "Communism - Stalinism". 2021. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Stalinism#ref539199

[2] Erik Van Ree. "Socialism in One Country: A Reassessment." Studies in East European Thought 50, no. 2 (1998): 77.

[3] Kate Frey. 2020. "An Introduction to Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution". Left Voice. https://www.leftvoice.org/an-introduction-to-trotskys-theory-of-permane… .

[4] "Communism - Stalinism". 2021. Encyclopedia Britannica.

[6] John P. Hardt and Carl Modig. The Industrialization of Soviet Russia in the First Half Century. Research Analysis Corp. McLean, 1968, pg. 6.

[8] Massimo Livi-Bacci. "On the Human Costs of Collectivization in the Soviet Union." Population and Development Review (1993): 751

[9] Ibid, pg. 744.

[10] Flewers, Paul. 2021. "The Economic Policy of The Soviet By Isaac Deutscher 1948". Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1948/economic-policy.htm .

[11] "Marshall Plan". 2021. History. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/marshall-plan-1 .

[12] Morroe Berger. "How the Molotov Plan Works." The Antioch Review 8, no. 1 (1948): 18.

[13] Joseph M. Siracusa. "Reflections on the Cold War." Australasian Journal of American Studies (2009): 3.

• Berger, Morroe. "How the Molotov Plan Works." The Antioch Review 8, no. 1 (1948): 17-25.
• "Communism - Stalinism". 2021. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Stalinism#ref539199 .
• Flewers, Paul. 2021. "The Economic Policy of the Soviet by Isaac Deutscher 1948". Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1948/economic-policy.htm .
• Frey, Kate. 2020. "An Introduction to Trotsky’S Theory of Permanent Revolution". Left Voice. https://www.leftvoice.org/an-introduction-to-trotskys-theory-of-permanent-revolution .
• Livi-Bacci, Massimo. "On the Human Costs of Collectivization in the Soviet Union." Population and Development Review (1993): 743-766.
• "Marshall Plan". 2021. History. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/marshall-plan-1.
• Siracusa, Joseph M. "Reflections on the Cold War." Australasian Journal of American Studies (2009): 1-16.
• Van Ree, Erik. "Socialism in One Country: A Reassessment." Studies in East European Thought 50, no. 2 (1998): 77-117.
• Hardt, John P. and Carl Modig. The Industrialization of Soviet Russia in the First Half Century. Research Analysis Corp. McLean, 1968.

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The US secretly sent communist-friendly Coca-Cola to a Soviet general in a bid to maintain good ties across the Iron Curtain

• Worsening relations between the Allies after World War II meant no commerce between East and West.
• That was an issue for Soviet Gen. Georgy Zhukov, who came to like Coca-Cola during the war.
• The US tried to get Coke to Zhukov to keep at least one friend across the Iron Curtain.

As World War II ended and the Iron Curtain fell over Eastern Europe, relations deteriorated between the Soviet Union and its Western allies.

The Soviet repudiation of the West and of capitalism went as far as banning business with Western companies, as there was no reason to trade with "imperialist" powers.

That created a problem for one of the most revered Soviet military leaders, marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, who oversaw many of the USSR's greatest victories against the Nazis.

The problem? Zhukov had developed an intense liking for Coca-Cola, a drink now illegal in the Soviet Union. Not only that, but Zhukov also feared that being seen consuming such a recognizable Western product would lead to punishment.

In an effort to maintain good ties, the Truman administration undertook a covert effort to get Zhukov the soda he wanted.

A cultural icon

Coca-Cola's steadfast support for the Allied war effort helped make it both distinctly American and recognizable worldwide.

As the US entered the war, Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff ordered his company "to see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the Company."

The soft drink was seen as an important morale booster and thus a wartime necessity. Coca-Cola bottling plants sprang up close to front lines all over the world to get the drinks to Allied troops as fast as possible.

More than 100 employees known as "Coca-Cola colonels" were even given the Army rank of technical observer and deployed to the front to ensure soldiers got their Cokes quickly and efficiently.

In 1943, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, a fan of the drink himself, ordered 3 million bottles to the front in North Africa. He also requested enough supplies and materials to refill 6 million more bottles every month.

Related stories

When Richard Bong, a US Army pilot in the Pacific theater, set the American record for air-to-air-combat victories in January 1944, Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold, the head of the Army Air Forces, sent him two cases of Coke as a reward.

By the end of the war, Allied military personnel had consumed 5 billion bottles of Coke from 64 bottling plants around the world.

'White Coke'

Zhukov acquired his taste for Coke after drinking it during a meeting with Eisenhower after the war. Zhukov could enjoy Coke in meetings with Western officials but not at home, as the Soviet Union had banned Coca-Cola outright.

No alternative sated Zhukov's thirst for Coke, but in 1946, he had an idea: If the drink were delivered without its distinctive caramel color, it could possibly be passed off as vodka.

Zhukov asked his American counterparts to see if such a feat was possible. Gen. Mark W. Clark, commander of US forces in the American sector of Allied-occupied Austria, eventually passed the request to President Harry Truman, who contacted James Farley, chairman of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation.

Coca-Cola was actually in the process of expanding its business operations in Austria, and one of its employees was assigned to the effort. A company chemist soon made a clear version of the drink by removing caramel from the ingredients.

At Zhukov's request, the new beverage wasn't put in the usual Coke bottles but instead in unmarked, straight-edged bottles. To create a communist-friendly appearance, Coca-Cola even used custom-made white caps emblazoned with a red star on the bottles.

Fifty crates of "white Coke" were delivered to the Soviets in Vienna. While all other goods entering the Soviet occupation zone were stopped and inspected, Coca-Cola was able to deliver the crates without interference.

In the end, the rare olive branch between East and West amounted to little more than a personal favor between wartime colleagues.

It's not known what became of the drinks or their bottles, and the exchange had no effect on the deteriorating relationship between the two blocs.

It didn't even earn Coca-Cola better treatment, either. Its rival Pepsi eventually gained a virtual monopoly in the Soviet Union, which the Soviets maintained — once trading several warships for $3 billion worth of Pepsi — until 1985.

Editor's note: This story was first published in July 2021 and has been updated.

Watch: Why Coca-Cola invented Fanta in Nazi Germany

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Crime Fiction and Communism

In 1971, when the Cuban government launched the Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution Crime Fiction award, local literary critics were acutely aware of the genre’s roots in a capitalist setting. Yet, José Antonio Portuondo considered that crime fiction could serve a purpose within a Communist framework of life, provided it underwent adaptation to suit the new context. Over the following years, Cuban journals published numerous programmatic texts aimed at guiding writers willing to produce what would be termed Revolutionary crime fiction. Similar adjustments took place in other Soviet bloc countries, albeit with varying degrees of success and popularity. While crime fiction from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Hungary are perhaps the most well-known cases, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia also produced significant crime narratives. At the same, however, some Communist leaders loathed the genre: Stalin deemed it “the most naked expression of bourgeois society’s fundamental ideas on property” and Mao banned crime fiction.

Simultaneously, several prominent crime fiction writers from Capitalist backgrounds have identified themselves as Communists at various points in their lives, including Dashiell Hammett, Ed Lacy, Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Henning Mankell, Frédéric Fajardie, Thierry Jonquet, among others.

Likewise, a number of Marxist thinkers have analysed the genre. Antonio Gramsci, for instance, included some reflections on detective fiction in his Prison Notebooks, while Trotskyite author Ernest Mandel extensively explored the genre in his Delightful Murder. A Social History of the Crime Story (curiously omitting any mention of crime fiction from the Soviet Bloc). More recently, Stephen Knight has established the relationship between social ideology and genre conventions and Slavoj Žižek has discussed Swedish crime fiction.

Despite all of this, the relationship between crime fiction and Communism remains largely understudied and lacks comprehensive analysis.We are compiling a collection of essays that seek to address the intersection of Communism and crime fiction narratives. Essays with a multinational approach, and dealing with crime fiction generated outside Anglo-American areas are encouraged. Survey essays are discouraged. Possible areas of research may include, but are not limited, to:

Crime fiction written in communist areas

Crime fiction by communist authors living in capitalist areas

Crime fiction set in communist areas

Crime fiction dealing with communist to-post communist transition

Approaches to crime fiction by Marxist thinkers

International circulation of communist crime fiction

Crime television series in communist countries 

Crime fiction that deals with the idea of youth and communism

Youth literature, crime fiction and communism

Advice for contributors

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, we ask that you submit an abstract of up to 300 words explaining the focus and approach to your proposed essay. Include an author bio of 200 words listing your current professional affiliation as well any relevant previous publications and other qualifications. Each final contribution should be around 7000 words, including bibliography. 

Abstracts should be emailed to  [email protected] or [email protected]  

Abstract submission deadline: 15 September 2024.

Authors notified of acceptance: 29 November 2024. 

Full paper submission deadline: 1 April 2025.

About the editors

Dr Carlos Uxo is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of El género policial en Cuba: Novela policial revolucionaria, neopolicial y teleseries (Peter Lang: 2021), and editor of The Detective Fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Manchester Metropolitan University: 2006). He has also published close to fifty academic articles and book chapters, including “Cuban Crime Fiction: A Literature for the (Communist) Masses” (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2019) and “Crime Fiction and Authoritarianism” (Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, 2020).

Dr Isabel Story is Senior Lecturer in Visual Communications at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is the author of Soviet Influence on Cuban Cultural Institutions 1961-1987 (Lexington 2019) and has edited books on Cuban disaster preparedness (Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change in Cuba, 2021) and social politics (Cuba’s Forgotten Decade, 2018). She specialises in the international projection of Cuban culture and in particular in cultural relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union and East Germany, the role of cultural heritage, and international collaboration. 

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) by El Lissitzky. Courtesy the Russian State Library/Wikimedia

Quantum dialectics

When quantum mechanics posed a threat to the marxist doctrine of materialism, communist physicists sought to reconcile the two.

by Jim Baggott   + BIO

The quantum revolution in physics played out over a period of 22 years, from 1905 to 1927. When it was done, the new theory of quantum mechanics had completely undermined the basis for our understanding of the material world. The familiar and intuitively appealing description of an atom as a tiny solar system, with electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus, was no longer satisfactory. The electron had instead become a phantom. Physicists discovered that in one kind of experiment, electrons behave like regular particles – as small, concentrated bits of matter. In another kind of experiment, electrons behave like waves. No experiment can be devised to show both types of behaviour at the same time. Quantum mechanics is unable to tell us what an electron is .

More unpalatable consequences ensued. The uncertainty principle placed fundamental limits on what we can hope to discover about the properties of quantum ‘wave-particles’. Quantum mechanics also broke the sacred link between cause and effect, wreaking havoc on determinism, reducing scientific prediction to a matter of probability – to a roll of the dice. We could no longer say: when we do this , that will definitely happen. We could say only: when we do this, that will happen with a certain probability.

As the founders of the theory argued about what it meant, the views of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr began to dominate. He concluded that we have no choice but to describe our experiments and their results using seemingly contradictory, but nevertheless complementary, concepts of waves and particles borrowed from classical (pre-quantum) physics. This is Bohr’s principle of ‘complementarity’. He argued that there is no contradiction because, in the context of the quantum world, our use of these concepts is purely symbolic. We reach for whichever description – waves or particles – best serves the situation at hand, and we should not take the theory too literally. It has no meaning beyond its ability to connect our experiences of the quantum world as they are projected to us by the classical instruments we use to study it.

Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. Alas, despite his strenuous efforts to exercise care in his use of language, Bohr could be notoriously vague and more than occasionally incomprehensible. Pronouncements were delivered in tortured ‘Bohrish’. It is said of his last recorded lecture that it took a team of linguists a week to discover the language he was speaking. And physicists of Bohr’s school, most notably the German theorist Werner Heisenberg, were guilty of using language that, though less tortured, was frequently less cautious.

It was all too easy to interpret some of Heisenberg’s pronouncements as a return to radical subjectivism, to the notion that our knowledge of the world is conjured only in the mind without reference to a real external world. It did not help that Bohr and physicists of Bohr’s school sought to shoehorn complementarity into other domains of enquiry, such as biology and psychology, and attempted to use it to resolve age-old conundrums concerning free will and the nature of life. Such efforts garnered little support from the wider scientific community and attracted plenty of opprobrium.

Albert Einstein famously pushed back, declaring that, unlike quantum mechanics, God does not play dice . He argued that, while quantum mechanics was undoubtedly powerful, it was in some measure incomplete.

In 1927, Bohr and Einstein commenced a lively debate. Einstein was joined in dissent by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who devised the conundrum of ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ to highlight the seemingly absurd implications of quantum mechanics. But although both Einstein and Schrödinger remained strident critics, they offered no counter-interpretation of their own. Despite their misgivings, there was simply no consensus on a viable alternative to complementarity.

C omplementarity also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s, through the Second World War, to the Cold War that followed. Both Bohr and Einstein were of Jewish descent and, to Nazi ideologues, complementarity and relativity theory were poisonous Jewish abstractions, at odds with the nationalistic programme of Deutsche Physik , or ‘Aryan physics’. But the proponents of Deutsche Physik failed to secure the backing of the Nazi leadership, and any threat to complementarity from Nazi ideology disappeared with the war’s ending. Much more enduring were the objections of Soviet communist philosophers who argued that complementarity was at odds with the official Marxist doctrine of ‘dialectical materialism’.

Vladimir Lenin, who had led the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution of 1917, was a dogmatic advocate of the materialist worldview expounded by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto , first published in 1848. The world according to Marxism consists of objectively existing matter in constant motion, bound by laws. Such laws govern different levels of existence that we attempt to describe through different scientific disciplines that are not necessarily reducible one to another. For example, sociology – regarded as an empirical science – is not reducible to physics and is therefore bound by its own laws of human social and economic behaviour.

Marx and Engels observed that such behaviour breeds functional contradictions within an organised society. To survive, people submit to exploitative relationships with the means of economic production and those who own them. Distinct classes emerge: masters and their slaves, lords and their serfs, business owners (the bourgeoisie) and their low-wage workers (the proletariat).

It was not enough just to interpret the world, Marx claimed. Philosophers must also seek to change it

These functional contradictions are ultimately resolved through inevitable class struggle resulting in irreversible changes in social organisation and the means of production. The classical antiquity of Greece and Rome had given way to feudalism. Feudalism had given way to capitalism. And capitalism was destined to give way to socialism and communism, to the utopia of a classless society. But the necessary changes in social organisation would not happen by themselves. The path led first through socialism and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, supported by an autocratic state that would eventually no longer be needed when the communist utopia was realised. For Lenin, the ends justified the means, which included the violent repression of bourgeois capitalist and counter-revolutionary forces.

In Marxist philosophy, the method of studying and apprehending both social and physical phenomena is dialectical, and the interpretation of natural phenomena is firmly materialistic. It was not enough just to interpret the world, Marx claimed. Philosophers must also seek to change it, and this could not be done in a world built only from perceptions and ideas. Any philosophy that sought to disconnect us from material reality, by reducing the world to mere sensation and experience, posed a threat to Marxism.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin had berated the physicist Ernst Mach and his Russian followers, and the German philosopher Richard Avenarius, who had formulated the positivist doctrine of empirio-criticism. The philosophy of positivism was anathema, as it sought to reduce knowledge of the world to sensory experience. Lenin argued that such thinking led only to a subjective idealism, or even solipsism. To him, this was just so much ‘gibberish’.

Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism. Nevertheless, an influential group of Soviet physicists, including Vladimir Fock, Lev Landau, Igor Tamm and Matvei Bronstein, promoted Bohr’s views and for a time represented the ‘Russian branch’ of Bohr’s school. This was not without some risk. Communist Party philosophers sought their dismissal, to no avail, largely because they could not agree on the issues among themselves.

T he situation in the Soviet Union changed dramatically a few years later. As his health declined, Lenin had tried to remove the Communist Party’s general secretary, Joseph Stalin, whom he deemed unfit for the role. But Stalin had been quietly consolidating his position and had placed loyalists in key administrative posts. After a brief power struggle following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin became supreme leader. In 1937-38, he tightened his grip by unleashing a reign of terror, known as the Great Purge, in which many of the old Bolsheviks who had fought alongside Lenin in 1917 were executed. Although the total death toll is difficult to determine, a figure of 1 million is not unreasonable. Physicists were not exempt. Bronstein was arrested, accused of terrorism offences, and executed in February 1938.

Stalin put his own stamp on the political ideology of Soviet communists in his short text titled Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), a formulation of Marxist philosophy that would be adopted as the official Communist Party line. Those intellectuals who resisted the official doctrine now faced real risks of losing more than just their jobs.

An outspoken commitment to complementarity became positively dangerous

The distractions of the Second World War meant that little changed for physicists until Andrei Zhdanov, the Party’s philosopher and propagandist-in-chief, who was thought by many to be Stalin’s successor-in-waiting, specifically targeted the interpretation of quantum mechanics in a speech delivered in June 1947. ‘The Kantian vagaries of modern bourgeois atomic physicists,’ he proclaimed, ‘lead them to inferences about the electron’s possessing “free will”, to attempts to describe matter as only a certain conjunction of waves, and to other devilish tricks.’ This was the beginning, writes the historian Loren Graham, ‘of the most intense ideological campaign in the history of Soviet scholarship’. An outspoken commitment to complementarity became positively dangerous.

Soviet physicists scrambled to defensible positions. Fock retreated from complementarity as an objective law of nature, and criticised Bohr for his vagueness. Others sought ways to ‘materialise’ quantum mechanics. Dmitry Blokhintsev, a student of Tamm’s, favoured a statistical interpretation based on the collective properties of an ‘ensemble’ of real particles. In such an interpretation we are obliged to deal with probabilities simply because we are ignorant of the properties and behaviours of the individual material particles that make up the ensemble. Einstein had used this conception in the opening salvo of his debate with Bohr in 1927. Yakov Terletsky who, like Tamm, had studied under the Soviet physicist Leonid Mandelstam, favoured a ‘pilot-wave’ interpretation of the kind that had initially been promoted by the French physicist Louis de Broglie before it was shot down by Bohr’s school in 1927. In this interpretation, a real wave field guides real particles, and probabilities again arise because we are ignorant of the details.

A s the 1930s progressed towards world war, many Western intellectuals had embraced communism as the only perceived alternative to the looming threat of Nazism. Numbered among the small group of Jewish communist physicists gathered around J Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley was David Bohm. As Oppenheimer began to recruit a team of theorists to work on the physics of the atomic bomb at the newly established Los Alamos National Laboratory in early 1943, Bohm was high on his list. But Bohm’s communist affiliations led the director of the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, to deny him the security clearance necessary to join the project.

Bohm was left behind at Berkeley and joined with his fellow communist and close friend Joseph Weinberg in teaching the absent Oppenheimer’s course on quantum mechanics. His long discussions with Weinberg, who argued that complementarity was itself a form of dialectic and so not in conflict with Marxist philosophy, encouraged him to accept Bohr’s arguments, although he was not free of doubt. In his textbook Quantum Theory (1951), derived in part from his experiences teaching Oppenheimer’s course, Bohm broadly adhered to Bohr’s views.

Bohm had by this time moved to Princeton University in New Jersey. Einstein, who in 1933 had fled from Nazi Germany to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, asked to meet with him sometime in the spring of 1951. The meeting re-awakened the Marxist materialist in Bohm. As Einstein explained the basis for his own misgivings, Bohm’s doubts returned. ‘This encounter with Einstein had a strong effect on the direction of my research,’ he later wrote, ‘because I then became seriously interested in whether a deterministic extension of the quantum theory could be found.’ Was there, after all, a more materialistic alternative to complementarity? ‘My discussions with Einstein … encouraged me to look again.’ Although there is no documented evidence to support it, Bohm later claimed he had also been influenced ‘probably by Blokhintsev or some other Russian theorist like Terletsky’.

Bohm’s theory sought to restore causality and determinism to the quantum world

But Bohm’s relationship with Weinberg had by now returned to haunt him. In March 1943, Weinberg had been caught betraying atomic secrets by an illegal FBI bug planted in the home of Steve Nelson, a key figure in the Communist Party apparatus in the San Francisco Bay Area. This evidence was inadmissible in court. In an attempt to expose Weinberg’s betrayal, in May 1949 Bohm had been called to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, set up by the House of Representatives to investigate communist subversion in the US. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment, a standard means of avoiding self-incrimination, which only raised more suspicion.

Bohm was arrested, then brought to trial in May 1951. He was acquitted (as was Weinberg a couple of years later). Now caught in the anti-communist hysteria whipped up by Joseph McCarthy, Bohm lost his position at Princeton. Only Einstein tried to help, offering to bring him to the Institute. But its new director – Oppenheimer, now lauded as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ and increasingly haunted by the FBI’s interest in his own Leftist past – vetoed Bohm’s appointment. Bohm left the US for exile in Brazil, from where he published two papers setting out what was, in effect, a re-discovery of de Broglie’s pilot-wave theory. The theory sought to restore causality and determinism to the quantum world and was firmly materialist. Oppenheimer rejected Bohm’s efforts as ‘juvenile deviationism’. Einstein, who had once toyed with a similar approach and might have been expected to be sympathetic, declared it ‘too cheap’.

Under a barrage of criticism, Bohm gained support from the French physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier, then assistant to de Broglie in Paris. He was just what Bohm needed: a resourceful theorist, a man of action, a hero of the French Resistance during the war, and a friend of the president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh. Invited to join Einstein in Princeton, Vigier’s communist associations had led the Department of State to forbid his entry into the US. He worked with Bohm on another variation of the pilot-wave theory and persuaded de Broglie to rekindle his interest in it, sounding alarm bells among the Bohr faithful: ‘Catholics and communists in France are uniting against complementarity!’

B ut Bohm’s mission to restore materiality to quantum mechanics amounted to more than demonstrating the possibility of a deterministic alternative. In 1935, working with his Princeton colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein had set up a stubborn challenge, a last throw of the dice in his debate with Bohr. In the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment, a pair of quantum particles interact and move apart, to the left and right, their properties correlated by some physical law. Schrödinger invented the term ‘ entanglement ’ to describe their situation. For simplicity, we assume that the particles can have properties ‘up’ and ‘down’, each with a 50 per cent probability.

We have no way of knowing in advance what results we’re going to get for each particle. But if the particle on the left is found to be ‘up’, the correlated particle on the right must be ‘down’, and vice versa. Now, according to quantum mechanics, the entangled particles are mysteriously bound together no matter how far apart they get, and the correlation persists. Suppose the particles move so far apart that any message or influence sent from one cannot get to the other even if it travels at the speed of light. How then does the particle on the right ‘know’ what result we obtained for the particle on the left, so that it can correlate itself?

We could assume that when they are sufficiently far apart the particles can be considered separate and distinct, or ‘locally real’. But this conflicts with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which forbids messages or influences from travelling faster than light, as Einstein himself explained: ‘One can escape from this conclusion only by either assuming that the measurement of [the particle on the left] (telepathically) changes the real situation of [the particle on the right] or by denying independent real situations as such to things which are spatially separated from each other . Both alternatives appear to me entirely unacceptable.’ (Emphasis added.) Particles that do not exist independently of each other are said to be ‘nonlocal’.

A prospective Soviet spy codenamed ‘Quantum’ attended a meeting at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC

Einstein was known for his pacifist and Leftist inclinations. Podolsky was Russian-born, and Rosen was a first-generation descendant of Russian émigrés. Both of Einstein’s assistants were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. Six months after the publication of the EPR paper, Rosen asked Einstein to recommend him for a job in the Soviet Union. Einstein wrote to the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov, praising Rosen for his talents as a physicist. Rosen was at first delighted with his new home, and soon he had a son. ‘I hope,’ Einstein wrote in congratulation, ‘that he too can help in furthering the great cultural mission that the new Russia has undertaken with such energy.’ But by October 1938 Rosen was back in the US, having discovered that his research did not prosper in the people’s paradise.

Podolsky had earned his PhD at the California Institute of Technology and had returned to the Soviet Union in 1931 to work with Fock and Landau (and the visiting English theorist Paul Dirac) at the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv. From there, he joined Einstein at the Institute in Princeton in 1933. Ten years later, a prospective atomic spy assigned the codename ‘Quantum’ by Soviet intelligence attended a meeting at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC and spoke with a high-ranking diplomat. Quantum was seeking an opportunity to join the Soviet effort to build an atomic bomb, and offered information on a technique for separating quantities of the fissile isotope uranium-235 . He was paid $300 for his trouble. In Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) files made public in 2009, Quantum was revealed to be Podolsky.

B ohm examined the EPR experiment in considerable detail. He developed an alternative that offered the prospect of translation from a thought experiment into a real one. With the Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov, in 1957 he sought to demonstrate that real experiments had in fact already been done (in 1950), concluding that they did indeed deny independent real situations to the separated particles, such that these cannot be considered locally real.

This was far from the end of the matter. Befuddled in his turn by Bohrian vagueness and inspired by Bohm, the Irish physicist John Bell also pushed back against complementarity and in 1964 built on Bohm’s version of EPR to develop his theorem and inequality. The experiments of 1950 had not gone far enough. Further experiments to test Bell’s inequality in 1972 and in 1981-82 demonstrated entanglement and nonlocality with few grounds for doubt.

It began to dawn on the wider scientific community that entanglement and nonlocality were real phenomena, leading to speculations on the possibility of building a quantum computer, and on the use of entangled particles in a system of quantum cryptography. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the three experimentalists who had done most to expose the reality of entanglement and its promise of ‘a new kind of quantum technology’. The projected value of the quantum computing industry is estimated to be somewhere between $9 billion and $93 billion by 2040. I doubt there is any other example in history of such a high-value industry constructed on a physical principle that nobody understands.

Marxism powered many objections to Bohr’s complementarity, and so helped to shape the development of postwar quantum mechanics. Soviet physicist-philosophers lent their support by finding positivist tendencies in Bohr’s teaching in conflict with dialectical materialism. Some sought an alternative materialistic interpretation. Podolsky and Rosen both admired the Soviet Union and in different ways sought to contribute to its mission. Bohm laboured at a time when there was little appetite for what many physicists judged to be philosophical, and therefore irrelevant, foundational questions. It says much about Bohm’s commitment that he resisted the temptation to leave such questions to play out in the theatre of the mind. The Marxist in Bohm sought not only to show that a materialistic alternative was possible, but also to find a way to bring the arguments into the real world of the laboratory.

It was not enough just to interpret the world. Bohm also sought to change it.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my colleague, co-author and friend, John Heilbron, who died on 5 November 2023.

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Guest Essay

Dear Boomers, the Student Protesters Are Not Idiots

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

Appearing last week on “Morning Joe,” Hillary Clinton lamented what she views as the ignorance of students protesting the war in Gaza. The host, Joe Scarborough, asked her about “the sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or from the Chinese Communist government through TikTok.” Ms. Clinton was happy to oblige. “I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months,” she said. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”

I’ve taught students at the college level for 12 years, most recently at New York University’s journalism school. I’ve also seen and heard the assumptions made about them by some of their elders — administrators, parents and others. So it’s no surprise now to hear protesters described as “ spoiled and entitled kids ” or delicate “ snowflakes ” who cower in their safe spaces and don’t believe in free speech . Billionaires like Ken Griffin , Bill Ackman and, of course, Donald Trump — as entitled as anyone — have been particularly vocal in their disdain, calling the students in one instance “whiny” and demanding that they be punished for protesting. Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican from New York, even suggested that TikTok should be banned in part because “you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.”

Whether they realize it or not, Ms. Clinton, Mr. Lawler and the rest are engaging in a moral panic about America’s youth that is part of a larger effort to discredit higher education in general. That effort includes fearmongering about diversity programs and critical race theory. But it starts with students.

In the current panic, the protesters are described as somehow both terribly fragile and such a threat to public safety that they need to be confronted by police officers in riot gear. To justify the police department’s excessive response at Columbia University, Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry showed Newsmax viewers a large chain and a book with the title “Terrorism” that had been recovered from one site of protest. The former was a common bike chain Columbia sells to students and the latter was part of Oxford University Press’s lovely “Very Short Introductions” series, which covers topics from animal behavior to Rousseau and black holes.

There are some obvious partisan factors at work here: Staunch support for Israel among Republicans , for instance, and the long-running right-wing insistence that elite universities are liberal indoctrination camps. But recent research reveals a significant generational divide as well. A recent YouGov poll found that 45 percent of people ages 45 to 64 strongly opposed the protests, as did 56 percent of people 65 and older. By comparison, only 12 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds strongly opposed them, and 21 percent of people ages 30 to 44.

It’s not just about Gaza; similar age gaps emerged in response to protests after the murder of George Floyd, too. Eighty-seven percent of adults ages 18 to 34 supported the protests in June 2020, according to Gallup , while only 54 percent of adults 65 and older did. And just 3 percent of the older group had participated in the protests, while 26 percent of the younger group had.

We know from research that adults under 40 are more likely to participate in a protest than adults over 40, and generally prefer informal political participation more than their older cohorts, who are more likely to participate by voting. But that doesn’t fully explain the outright hostility some have leveled at campus protesters.

High-profile public figures of all ideological stripes have varyingly called for the students to be kicked out of their institutions, made unemployable or sent to prison. They’ve floated implausible scenarios in which the protests turn deadly. Students brave enough to risk their financial aid and scholarships are derided as childish rather than principled. And though they are educated to participate in civic life, as soon as these students exercise their First Amendment rights, they are told that protecting private property is a more pressing public concern. It’s as though some older adults simply can’t wrap their heads around the idea that college students, who are old enough to marry, have families and risk their lives for their country, are capable of having well thought-out principles.

“They basically want students to shut up and study,” is how Robert Cohen, a scholar of 20th-century social protest, put it when I spoke to him this week. It doesn’t matter how virtuous the cause, he explained; older generations start with a bias against students. But protest is often the only way students have any voice at all in university matters. “People do not understand that university governance is fundamentally undemocratic,” Mr. Cohen said, noting that even students who have convinced universities to consider divestment have won, at best, the right to make their case to the board.

In my experience, the stereotypes about today’s students are often ludicrously far from reality. College students of this generation have far more knowledge about complex world events than mine or Ms. Clinton’s did, thanks to the availability of the internet and a 24/7 news cycle fire-hosed directly into their phones. Representative Lawler may be correct that some portion of that information comes from clips on TikTok, and social media can be misleading, but there’s no evidence that college students are more likely to be misled by TikTok than people Mr. Lawler’s age and older are likely to be misled by Facebook. In fact, research indicates that younger people are more savvy and skeptical about media, and more likely to triangulate among different sources to see if something is true.

They may also be more sensitive to the horrors of children being killed here and elsewhere because they grew up participating in active shooter drills and watching the aftermath of mass shootings on the news. They are less financially secure than generations prior, and less likely to believe that institutions will save them or reward them for loyalty and hard work . But they are not babies, and they are not oblivious or naïve. And their ideas and actions cannot be dismissed just because some bad actor — no mass movement is without them — does or says something stupid.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to those who find protests uncomfortable. They’re always disruptive, as they’re supposed to be. And big loud crowds make me nervous now in a way that they didn’t when I was 22 and a big loud crowd was fun and meant I was at a club with oontz-oontz-oontz music and 73 of my closest friends. I now prefer political participation that is less hard on the knees. But I am exhilarated to see students using protest for exactly the reasons it’s protected by the First Amendment. It allows them to stand up for their values, invest in what’s happening in the world and hold decision makers accountable, even if it means putting themselves at risk. And most compellingly, it’s getting the attention of the president and other lawmakers who can effect change far beyond the walls of any university campus.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Opinion Germany’s past just might hold the keys to America’s future

Checking corporate power doesn’t have to make for a weak economy.

Regarding Joseph Stiglitz’s May 16 Thursday Opinion column, “ Time’s up for neoliberals ”:

Mr. Stiglitz called for a progressive capitalism to counter the neoliberal doctrines fueling an antidemocratic backlash around the world. The economic success of postwar Germany suggests that Americans need not start from scratch.

In the previous century, a group of anti-fascist German scholars devised a philosophy they named “ordoliberalism.” It was rooted in two key ideas: Competition is more important than efficiency and a well-functioning market economy must serve the ends of social justice and individual freedom.

They began to develop their views in the 1930s, as fascism was gaining ground in Europe, Soviet communism ruled Russia, and Western capitalism was dominated by giant cartels and trusts. These conditions meant they never lost sight of the dangers of concentrated economic power, which could be exercised both by government, as in a totalitarian regime, or by big corporate interests. And while some ordoliberals were arrested or driven into exile during the Nazi dictatorship, others continued working underground, and their ideas influenced postwar German reconstruction.

As the 1949 Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany states,“Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.” That idea was expressed through Germany’s employment-based social insurance system; a stable currency; inflation held in check through collective bargaining; and a steep 50 percent tax on private and public property to “equalize burdens” between those who had accumulated wealth and those who had lost property during the war. Germany believed that all of society — labor, employers, taxpayers — must share in the costs and benefits of public investment in education and training, expanding the apprenticeship model that has kept youth unemployment low and industry competitive.

And in 1957, Germany adopted a competition law prohibiting cartels and any concentrations of market power that restrict freedom of enterprise or limit competition. The thinking behind Germany’s competition law underlies European-wide competition law enacted in the treaties of Paris, Rome and Maastricht that established the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and finally the European Union. Europe’s competition regime has been vital to the continent’s peace and prosperity.

And while ordoliberalism is a German creation, it is also part of a larger intellectual tradition with roots, and present-day expressions, in the United States. The philosophy was heavily influenced by turn-of-the-century American progressives, particularly Justice Louis Brandeis, an antimonopolist who has returned to fashion as a key influence on modern-day critics of laissez-faire economics such as Tim Wu and Lina Khan.

Power concentrations will always arise and attempt to suppress threats to their economic advantages and influence over government. As the ordoliberals recognized, freedom and social justice are linked. When monopolists abuse the market economy, both freedom and social justice are weakened. When government vigorously protects competition, then the economy can truly serve society.

Thomas F. Remington , Cambridge, Mass.

The writer is a visiting professor at Harvard University and the author of “The Returns to Power: A Political Theory of Economic Inequality.”

Thank you for publishing Joseph Stiglitz’s opinion column.

“The proper role of government is to protect the weak from the strong” is my response to both neoliberals and neoconservatives who question whether the federal government is doing too much or too little. We have a criminal justice system to protect us from bad actors at home. We have an Army to protect us from bad actors abroad.

And we have federal and state laws to protect us from large corporations. Left unchecked (and unregulated) in the best neoliberal tradition, they would run roughshod over their customers. They would act only in the interest of their own profits, to the detriment of our needs and planet. They have proved this time and again. The courts are not the answer. Imagine the lawyers Google or Facebook could marshal against me if I sued one of them over a legitimate grievance.

Neoliberals and neoconservatives alike agree that the state has the first two roles but vehemently disagree with the third, even though corporate power presents a clear and present danger equal to the threat of crime or foreign conflict.

Ron Cordes , King of Prussia, Pa.

Zionism’s future

Regarding Yuval Noah Harari’s May 15 Wednesday Opinion essay, “ Will Zionism survive the war? ”

I read Mr. Harari’s excellent essay with great interest and agree with many of his observations. He makes clear, rightly enough, that he opposes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the type of Zionism he represents. Defeating Mr. Netanyahu would be a clear step in the right direction, in my opinion. But what does Mr. Harari want for Israel after the Netanyahu government? A Labor government? If so, what difference might that make?

As Mr. Harari must surely know, while David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel’s first prime minister and leader of the Mapai party, advocated for and accepted the division of Palestine, he did not agree to be bound by the borders sanctioned by the United Nations. Nor did he accept the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in the new Jewish state. His Labor successors also rejected borders proposed by the United Nations and refused to allow Muslim and Christian refugees to return to their homes. Levi Eshkol, a Labor prime minister, launched the Six-Day War in 1967 , later described by Prime Minister Menachem Begin as a war of choice , if also a defensive one. Labor Prime Ministers Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak authorized the confiscation of Palestinian land and the movement of hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews into East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

I agree that Israel and Jews all over the world have a lot at stake in the way Israel deals with its Arab citizens and neighbors. And so does the United States, which has aligned itself closely with Israel.

For Zionism to survive, it’s time for a clearer break with the past. Instead of vetoing U.N. resolutions opposed by Israel and providing weapons that are not truly necessary for Israel’s self-defense, our country should openly side with Mr. Harari and the Israelis like him.

Kenneth Longmyer , Falls Church

The writer, a retired Foreign Service officer, served in Jerusalem and in the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs.

Yuval Noah Harari’s column was very wise.

My family has a long history of support for Israel. My uncle served as commander of Israel’s 7th Armored Brigade in its war of independence. After conquering Nazareth, he also refused to expel the Arabs from the city. Although a warrior, he was a man of peace who believed Israel should stand for tolerance, fairness and justice. His mentor, David Ben-Gurion, shared that vision and accepted the U.N. mandate for a Palestinian state, as did his deputy, Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated for that view by an Israeli extremist. Their founding vision for a fair and just Israel is the only moral one and the only one that can succeed.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of that vision, his support for settlements, rejection of a two-state solution and general tough-guy, no-holds-barred aggressiveness have isolated Israel and turned it from a symbol of fairness and justice to one of intolerance and oppression. That is making Israel a pariah and hurting Jews everywhere. Netanyahu is right that Israel cannot be on the leash of other nations. But it must always be on the leash of righteousness.

Thomas Wilner , Washington

As one would expect, Yuval Noah Harari offered a thoughtful proposal for a Zionism that not only accommodates but ultimately relies upon the creation of a Palestinian state. However, with respect, Mr. Harari fails to offer any ideas for how such a proposal can become a reality.

Mr. Harari fairly admits that only one-third of the Israeli population now favors a two-state solution, and he could have added that more than 500,000 Israelis inhabit settlements that now spread throughout the West Bank and are growing every day. Yet he doesn’t answer the inevitable question: Given these facts, what is to be done?

This is where the United States comes in. If one agrees with Mr. Harari’s conclusion that an Israeli “river to the sea” stance is no more acceptable than the Palestinian version, then Israel must withdraw from the West Bank. For five decades, the United States has permitted, if not encouraged, a settlement process that violates international law, common sense and simple moral precepts. And now we, and Israel, are trapped by an Israeli population that is close to seeing a Jewish West Bank as a fait accompli and a government that already does. This puts in jeopardy the two-state solution, the only realistic path toward a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. If Israeli politicians are unwilling to extricate themselves from the trap they have created, then a U.S.-led sanction regime tied to settlement withdrawal, or a cessation of military and economic support, could provide the impetus for change.

The United States can no longer be a bystander to this catastrophe. We must finally see that, by providing no-strings military and economic lifelines to Israel despite its settlement policy, we endanger the very Zionist principles Mr. Harari promotes in his essay.

Alan Ferber , Alexandria

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