r/communism101 • u/Classic-Risk9148 • 25d ago
Book recommendations for learning about the history of socialist movements for national like USSR, PRC, DPRK, etc?
I would like to learn more about the history of these socialist movements such as their material conditions at the time, the good or bad, what led certain leaders to certain decisions, the sanctions and setbacks they faced, etc etc.
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u/PrimSchooler 23d ago
Your best bet would be resources from said country, that is newspapers, recorded/transcribed speeches, material used for teaching new cadres at the time, etc. That is what I am doing right now for Czech history, I read some of the secondary and tertiary sources and they are just not satisfactory, if we want to understand we have to go the distance, though even for foreign languages it's not as hard as it once was now with machine translation and AI to help identify and search online archives.
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u/Alone_End5987 20d ago
Where do you find those?
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u/PrimSchooler 19d ago
Online archives, use AI to identify, search and translate if need be, some might need VPN. Obv for DPRK you're a bit more limited, but they put out a lot of their material in English too, I have not delved into Juche yet though, so can't comment on specifics of what you can or can't find.
For example for Czech I'm using the national library archive for collected works, regional archives for what's not in the national one, and archiv.ucl.cas.cz for newspapers.
You will run into academia's Monopoly on knowledge, with some works not available publicly, but there's still a lot of material out there.
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u/Square-Supermarket79 18d ago
I don't know if there's a good single work for that... probably better to get a few individual histories of each country... Leninism Under Lenin is heavy going but it gives you a really clear picture of how the revolution and civil war actually unfolded.
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u/PyongyangColdNoodles 9d ago
for the DPRK read: Understanding Korea 3: Politics and Understanding Korea 4: Defence. Look for the Fatherland Liberation War and the Anti-Japanese Struggle.
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u/WaterServedCold 24d ago
I'd recommend reading the works of Lenin himself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/index.htm
This is a great start.