Did Communism Really Fall?

Sean McMeekin

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Whenever the foreign news is especially depressing, I like to reminisce about the halcyon days of 1989, when the fall of the Berlin wall so memorably illustrated the collapse of Communist tyranny in eastern Europe, or 1991, when a still relatively sober Boris Yeltsin stared down an “anti-democratic” coup mounted by stodgy Soviet bureaucrats and then grandly outlawed the Russian Communist Party, perpetrator of so many crimes in the USSR, Europe, and Asia. If domestic affairs get me down, I recall fondly the atmosphere of 1994 and 1995 when, as a wide-eyed Stanford undergraduate in the heart of Silicon Valley, I witnessed the exciting launch of the World Wide Web, with its heady promise of new liberties dawning in cyberspace.

The reverie does not last long. Even in 1989, I have to remind myself, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), demonstrating ruthlessness that the last Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev fortunately lacked, had placed a giant asterisk on the “fall of Communism” narrative by slaughtering hundreds of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Since the West followed China down the Covid path of forcible quarantine, Orwellian “contact tracing” and online surveillance and censorship in 2020—enabled, to my shame, by Stanford University’s now-disbanded “Internet Observatory”—the failure of Communist-style statist tyranny to die off is hard to ignore. We should not forget that President Yeltsin lost in court when the Communist Party sued to be reinstated in 1992; it is still the second-largest political party in Russia. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the aggressive western sanctions (and Russian counter-measures) that followed it, relations between Moscow and the West are now colder, by many measures, than at the height of the Cold War. As for the vaunted World Wide Web, compare a typical headline from its muse, Wired magazine, in 1995 (“Save Free Speech in Cyberspace!”) to today (August 19, 2024): “The Pentagon is Planning a ‘Drone Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan.”