TTC - Communism in Power: From Stalin to Mao

In 1924, mourners in Moscow filed past the mummified body of Vladimir Lenin, dead from a stroke after seven tumultuous years working to transform czarist Russia into the first communist state in history. The struggle to determine a successor to Lenin saw the rise of an unscrupulous party official named Joseph Stalin, who outwitted his rivals to become the nation’s new leader, dedicated to perfecting the revolution and exporting it around the globe. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, communist governments controlled a third of the world’s population and were mounting a serious challenge to Western democracies. To many people, communism was the unstoppable wave of the future.

Trace the growth of this influential ideology from Stalin’s consolidation of power to the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Communism in Power: From Stalin to Mao. These 12 half-hour lessons shed intriguing light on a revolutionary movement that played an outsized role in the 20th century and continues to shape 21st-century geopolitics.

Your instructor is Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he has been awarded the university’s top two teaching awards. The course is a follow-up to his 12-lesson series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin, which covers the ideas of Karl Marx and their legacy through the death of Lenin. Communism in Power: From Stalin to Mao picks up the story, focusing on two major trends: Stalinism and Post-Stalinism in Lessons 1–7 and Communism in Asia in Lessons 8–12.