The City College of New York has sat there in Hamilton Heights since 1847, before the US Civil War. In the late 1930s, its canteen was filled with poor immigrant kids, all new to the New World and many of them the first person in their families to ever go to university.
This being the late 1930s, there were the Trotskyists who sat in one alcove of that dining hall. They spent their days arguing with one another and with the Stalinists who sat in the neighboring alcove.
In those days, they were all convinced that Communism was the future, and so it mattered what kind of Communism prevailed.
Well… we are in 2025 today. We know what kind of Communism prevailed.
Trotsky was expelled from Russia in 1929, but it wasn’t until August 1940 that he was finally murdered: with an ice axe, through the ear, into the brain, and in Mexico City. Stalin had won. Lenin had died in January 1924, and finally, now, 16 years later, Stalin had once-and-for-all finally won. Communism was his, for sure this time.
However, we never got Communism, to be honest.
We got a one-party totalitarian police state; an urban, party elite in the capital that extracted wealth from the periphery.
Stalin ruled Russia from 1929 until his death in 1953. He died peacefully in his bed. It was only after his death that we were able to stop the Korean War, and in February 1956 Khrushchev was able to give his secret speech at the 20th Party Congress.
Nonetheless, Stalin’s shadow still looms large over Eastern Europe, and we’re in 2025 now, 147 years after Stalin’s birth in far away Georgia. That’s quite a shadow.
The only good thing that can be said about Stalin’s one-party totalitarian police state is that it defeated the Nazis. A democracy could never have done that. The required losses would have been too much for voters. Only a one-party totalitarian police state is capable of accepting the losses required to defeat another one-party totalitarian police state.
Does defeating the Nazis wash Stalin’s regime clean? No. No it doesn’t. The Eastern Front is probably the worst thing humans have ever done to each other, maybe only after colonialism and slavery. The losses incurred on the Eastern Front… are what defeated Hitler’s Germany. Humanity at its most savage.
As for the hopeful university canteen students of late 1930s City College of New York, alas, Communism never became their future. Most of them grew up and broke with Marxism during the Stalin era, many of them becoming FDR Democrats. Some fought the Nazis in Europe and realized that if Communism were ever to come to America, it would turn into a massively corrupt criminal enterprise, which it has done in Russia, Mainland China, and elsewhere. After August 1945, many of those university students went on to become social scientists at places like Harvard, Princeton, or UC Berkeley. Others became journalists or editors of magazines.
And, in the end, we never did get Communism. Alas, that boat has now sailed. We are now in need of some new civilizational drive among youth today, our own civilizing mission, as it were, to band us all together as we move forward through time, improving humanity as we go along.
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