Coming out of the Bolshevik Revolutionin Russia, and then expanding to both Eastern Europe and China after World War II, Communism came to exert such a pervasive influence on the 20th century that up to the early 1980s, there was no aspect of politics, international relations, social life, art or culture that was not permeated by it. And yet, barely two decades after its fall, the set of theories and practices that was once regarded as " the future of humanity" lies almost forgotten. HIST 516 is an attempt to think back from the early 21st century to the concrete visage and historical legacy of Marxism in power, exploring especially the party that was its chief instrument, the theories through which it eternalized its dictatorship, fostered a permanent culture of "the enemy" and legitimized its purges, as well as the daily structures of living perpetually in an atmosphere of abnormal politics, with a new social contract of basic services but without any fundamental, constitutionally guaranteed rights and political empowerment.
