Grades 9-12: History of Communism

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Instruction includes why communist nations seize and take control of all means of communication (e.g., print, radio, TV, internet, social media). 

Instruction includes using censorship, self-censorship, and compelled speech to prevent dissent.

Instruction includes the use of lies and propaganda to hide, cover, or excuse regime failures or excesses (e.g., Stalin’s Russia and the western press (Walter Duranty) concealment of the Holodomor, Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless; attempts to control media).

Instruction includes altering and manipulating history and scholarship to counter perceived enemies or promote regime leaders.

Instruction includes the monopoly on education to indoctrinate and control the population from childhood. 

Instruction includes a review of the various security services communist leaders have created and used to control their populations (e.g., Soviet Union’s Cheka and Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB); East German Stasi; Cuba’s Ministry of Interior; China’s Ministry of State Security; Cambodia’s Santebal; Venezuela’s Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional (SEBIN).

Instruction includes use of imprisonment, torture, mass executions, and forced labor camps to instill fear and compliance (e.g., Soviet GULAG system, Cuba’s expansive political prison system, Cambodia’s Killing Fields, China’s Laogai, and Uyghur re-education camps).

Instruction includes use of famine as a weapon (e.g., Lenin’s famine, Stalin’s engineered famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan (Holodomor), Cambodia’s Killing Fields).

Instruction includes the use of surveillance, security forces and informants to monitor and control the population (e.g., the ratio of security services personnel to population, children as informants and enforcers in the Soviet Union, China’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s S-21 camp guards).

Instruction includes a review of communist statements on religion and God in society (e.g., Marx on religion as “the opium of the people,” Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro statements against religion).

Instruction includes communist governments’ propaganda against religion (e.g., propaganda campaigns against religion in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin; China’s campaigns against religious expression, including the repression of Islam among the Uyghurs).

Instruction includes violence against faith groups, houses of faith and religious minorities (e.g., Lenin’s assault on the Orthodox Church resulting in 22,000 killed; Stalin’s League of Militant Godless and execution of 85,000 Orthodox Clergy; Soviet destruction or repurposing of houses of worship; Albania as the first atheist nation; Soviet bloc persecution of religious minorities including Jews and Muslims; China’s campaign against Muslim Uyghurs that includes reeducation camps and forced sterilization).

Instruction includes the effect of decades of communist rule on religious belief (e.g., enduringly reduced levels of religious affiliations in post-Communist European nations).

Instruction includes the establishment of a substitute quasi-religious veneration of leading communist individuals and institutions (e.g., Lenin’s Tomb, Palace of the Soviets).

Instruction includes the use of denunciations (e.g., Dazibao, Cuba’s Comités de Defensa de la Revolución [CDR]), loss of employment, loss of homes, family and friends and imprisonment to gain submission to the state).

Instruction includes using fear of the other (e.g., foreigners, minorities, other ethnic groups, fifth column and traitors) to amplify a sense of crisis only the state can resolve.

Instruction includes the use of show trials, torture, terror campaigns and purges (e.g., Lenin’s Red Terror, Stalin’s Great Terror [Industrial party show trial of 1930 and the Old Bolsheviks Trial 1936], execution quotas, executions of 17th Party Congress, China’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s terror campaign to eliminate minority groups).

Instruction includes the use of various real, manufactured, or perceived crises as an occasion to call for authoritarian state intervention.

Instruction includes the repercussions for non-compliance within a communist state.

Instruction includes the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain as both a metaphor and an actual physical barrier.

Instruction includes the use of student exchanges between communist states and democratic countries.

Instruction includes bans on leaving the country.

Instruction includes internal passport systems (e.g., China’s Social Credit System, Soviet Union’s National Identification Card).

Instruction includes the suppression of freedoms (e.g., speech, religion, press, assembly, fair trial, property, bearing arms, contract, familial autonomy, political affiliation, privacy).

Instruction includes the forcible dismantling of social relationships.

Instruction includes the intrusion of the state into all facets of life. 

Instruction includes the abolition of private property and enterprise.

Instruction includes the professed desire to eliminate divisions between classes and the creation of a new and privileged ruling class of Communist party members and bureaucrats (e.g., Soviet nomenklatura, Milovan Djilas’ analysis of a “new class,” China’s Princelings). 

Instruction includes the desire to focus a nation’s resources on the goals of the communist party.

Instruction includes the continual expansion of social welfare to compensate for the lack of a free market.

Instruction includes the elimination of the freedom of workers to choose their place of employment, to bargain with employers, individually and collectively through unions. 

Instruction includes the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Instruction includes the failed political liberalization of Russia after 1905, establishment of the Duma, revolutionary terrorism, renewed Tsarist repression of the people and the abortive Stolypin economic reforms.

Instruction includes the immense suffering World War I inflicted on the Russian people (e.g., millions dead and wounded, refugees, the forced removal of civilians, food shortages, extreme hunger, disease).

Instruction includes the role of Tsar Nicholas II’s leadership in peace and war and the influence of Rasputin.

Instruction includes the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. 

Instruction includes the emergence of the Bolshevik Party as a radical faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and its distinctive belief that a small revolutionary vanguard should possess centralized control of both the party and the state.

Instruction includes the execution of Vladimir Lenin’s brother by Tsar Alexander III, Vladimir Lenin’s leadership of the Bolshevik Party, his individual role in developing Bolshevik theory, and his relationship with foreign governments during his decade of exile between 1907 and 1917.

Instruction includes the decision of most European socialist parties to support their nations’ war efforts during World War I and the Bolsheviks’ consistent and uniform opposition to the “imperialist war.”

Instruction includes the February Revolution, the role of Alexander Kerensky, the Provisional Government, the Petrograd Soviet (Ispolkom), Order No. 1, and the Kerensky offensive.

Instruction includes the October Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power, the overthrow of the Duma and Provisional Government, the establishment of one-party dictatorship, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) withdrawing Russia from World War I.

Instruction includes the Russian Civil War, creation of the Cheka, the Red Terror and Lenin’s Hanging Order of 1918, the murder of Tsar Nicholas and the royal family, the use of poison gas during the Tambov Rebellion, the Kronstadt Rebellion, and the formal establishment of the Soviet Union in1922.

Instruction includes War Communism, including brutal repression of political opposition, the intentional destruction of the Imperial Russian Ruble, expropriating private industry, banning private enterprise, requisitioning and rationing food, mass famine and food relief distributed by the American Relief Administration, suppression of strikes, expropriation of the Church and the mass murder of priests. 

Instruction includes the historical roles of prominent individuals including Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky.

Instruction includes the political history of interwar Soviet Russia, including the New Economic Policy, the rise of Josef Stalin and the purge and murder of Leon Trotsky and his other rivals, collectivization and the First Five Year Plan, and the Great Terror.

Instruction includes the domestic policies of interwar Soviet Russia, including the destruction of individual rights, government seizure of most privately owned industry and commerce, introduction of internal passports to control people’s movements, rejection of any religion, the politicization of science (Trofim Lysenko), and the “cult of personality” that glorified Stalin.

Instruction includes Soviet Russia’s systematic use of state terror, including the development of the secret police (Cheka, NKVD), the GULAG forced labor network, purges of the military officer corps, terror against the citizenry, dekulakization (mass murder of peasants), genocidal starvation of an estimated 6-10 million Ukrainians and Kazakhs (Holodomor), and democide (estimated 10% of Soviet population murdered).

Instruction includes interwar Soviet foreign policy and Soviet support for foreign Communist parties and popular fronts, including the Communist Party of the United States of America.

Instruction includes the opposition to reform socialists that catalyzed the rise of fascist governments, and foreign policy in Asia, including support for Chinese Communists.

Instruction includes the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1941, Soviet annexations and population deportations (e.g., Baltic States and Poland).

Instruction includes the German and Soviet invasions of Poland, the division of Poland, the entry of France and the United Kingdom into the war, and the Katyn massacre.

Instruction includes the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland.

Instruction includes wartime Soviet history from 1941 to 1945, including the German invasion, the Holocaust, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Battle of Stalingrad.

Instruction includes Soviet war policy, including ethnic cleansing, abuse of American prisoners of wars, looting operations in conquered countries, the Yalta Conference, the occupation of Eastern Europe, and atrocities and rampant violence committed against foreign civilian populations.

Instruction includes the Western decision to support Yugoslav Partisan leader Josip Tito instead of Colonel Draza Mihailovic.

Instruction includes the debate among American and British leaders during and immediately after World War II about whether to occupy larger portions of Central and Eastern Europe to protect them from Communist takeover or, as was eventually decided, to agree to Soviet occupation of the region.

Instruction includes the Soviet Union’s communization of Eastern and Central Europe after World War II, including the 1948 coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia, the Stalin-Tito split, the Show Trials, and the formation of the Warsaw Pact.

Instruction includes the chronic rebellions in the Eastern Bloc, including the East German Uprising (1953), the Hungarian Uprising (1956), the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia (1968), and Solidarity in Poland (1980-1989).

Instruction includes the West’s response to communism in the early Cold War (e.g., the policy of containment, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the formation of NATO, the introduction of atomic weapons and disarmament movements, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, and the 4,300 mile wall dividing Eastern and Western Europe from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea).

Instruction includes Soviet penetration of Western intelligence services (e.g., the Cambridge Five).

Instruction includes Soviet funding and arming of communist uprisings around the world.

Instruction includes the major periods of the postwar Soviet Union, including Stalin’s renewed repression (Doctor’s Plot), the dismantling of the GULAGs (1953-1960), Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw (1956 Secret Speech), and Leonid Brezhnev’s Era of Stagnation (declining economic growth, corruption, dwindling belief in Communism).

Instruction includes growing security challenges to the Soviet Union, including the Sino-Soviet split, rising defense costs, Soviet defeat in the Soviet-Afghan War and the role of Ronald Reagan’s military rearmament (Strategic Defense Initiative).

Instruction includes how the Chernobyl disaster (1986) and the Armenian earthquake (1988) exposed the decay of Soviet institutions.

Instruction includes the role of Soviet dissidents (e.g., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky).

Instruction includes the Samizdat System (self-publication, smuggling and distribution) (e.g., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Beatles, and The Velvet Underground).

Instruction includes Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the Soviet Union, including perestroika, glasnost, and the 1989 Soviet legislative election.

Instruction includes the end of Soviet control of East Germany, including President Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech in 1987, protests in Poland and Hungary that inspired protests in East Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Instruction includes the end of Soviet control of Eastern Europe, including the Solidarity Movement’s role in bringing about free elections in Poland, Vaclav Havel and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Christmas Revolution in Romania.

Instruction includes the rise of Boris Yeltsin, uprisings in Lithuania and Latvia, the unsuccessful August Coup and Gorbachev’s resignation.

Instruction includes the dissolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the declarations of independence of the now-former Soviet republics, and the lowering of the Kremlin’s Soviet flag for the last time.

Instruction includes voucher privatization and the rise of Russian oligarchs.

Instruction includes the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, and Russia’s subsequent violations.

Instruction includes the authoritarian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

Instruction includes selections from notable literary works, such as Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Heda Margolius Kovály’s Under a Cruel Star, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

Instruction includes government documents, speeches, Soviet propaganda, diaries, letters, and memoirs.

Instruction includes the totalitarian ambition of the Soviet state and the suffering of the victims of communism.

Instruction includes the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the establishment of the Republic of China, the roles of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or Guomindang), the Warlord Era, and Japan’s attempts to dominate and conquer China (1915-1945).

Instruction includes the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including the May Fourth Movement (1919), the Communist alliance with the Nationalist Party in the First United Front (1924-1927), the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, and shifting Soviet support from the Nationalist Party to the Chinese Communist Party.

Instruction includes the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949; the CCP’s early consolidation of power, land redistribution, and the suppression of opposition; and the escape of the Republic of China’s government to Taiwan. 

Instruction includes the Long March and Mao Zedong’s emphasis on the peasantry as the primary revolutionary force, contrasting with classical Marxism’s focus on the urban proletariat.

Instruction includes Mao Zedong’s use of propaganda, the development of a cult of personality, the suppression of dissent through purges and re-education campaigns.

Instruction includes the estimated 65 million people who died due to Mao Zedong’s policies.

Instruction includes Mao Zedong’s goals of rapid industrialization and forced agricultural collectivization.

Instruction includes government policies and their consequences, including iron quotas resulting in pig-iron and backyard furnaces, crop production experiments, lying about production levels by farmers and party members, using food for export rather than consumption and censorship of discussion about famine or starvation.

Instruction includes the resulting mass famine and the program’s broader effect on Chinese society and the economy.

Instruction includes the estimated 15-55 million people who died due to the Great Leap Forward. 

Instruction includes Mao Zedong’s motivations for launching the Cultural Revolution, including fears of opposition within the Chinese Communist Party, desire to eliminate all capitalist influences from Chinese society, his response to perceived threats after the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and the subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign.

Instruction includes the role of the Red Guards, Shock Troops, the Little Red Book, the persecution of intellectuals, and the destruction of historical and cultural artifacts.

Instruction includes the long-term economic, political, and social consequences of the Cultural Revolution, including its effect on China’s leadership.

Instruction includes the long-term consequences of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese educational system, including the closing of schools and universities, intellectuals targeted by the state, millions of youths, including Xi Jinping, sent to the countryside to be “re-educated” (Down to the Countryside Movement).

Instruction includes the shift toward a “socialist market economy” and the introduction of capitalist elements (e.g., open-door policy, special economic zones, foreign investment policies).

Instruction includes the contrast between economic liberalization and continued political repression under Deng Xiaoping’s rule.

Instruction includes the One-Child Policy established in 1980.

Instruction includes the Household Responsibility System established in 1982.

Instruction includes the origins of the pro-democracy movement, the role of students and intellectuals, and the key events leading to the 1989 protests centered at Tiananmen Square.

Instruction includes the Chinese government’s military response to remove protestors from Tiananmen Square and the death toll of at least several hundred protestors.

Instruction includes the effect of the massacre on China’s domestic policies and global reputation.

Instruction includes China’s economic expansion, global trade influence, and competition with the United States.

Instruction includes the One-China policy and the United Nation’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China in 1971.

Instruction includes China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 the effect that had on the country’s economic growth.

Instruction includes China’s mimicry of successful organizations and policies originating from the United States.

Instruction includes internal repression, including policies in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.

Instruction includes Uyghur oppression and genocide (e.g., re-education camps, slave labor, torture, forced sterilization, execution by organ harvesting).

Instruction includes the government's use of surveillance, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence for political and social control (i.e., the Social Credit System).

Instruction includes the policies and rule of Xi Jinping (e.g., National Security Law of 2020 for the purpose of extraditing civilians to mainland China, censorship of media).

Instruction includes China’s influence in the United States, including corporate and political espionage, economic leverage, and use of educational organizations for the purpose espionage and technological influence.

Instruction includes China’s investment in international infrastructure projects (i.e., China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the Belt and Road Initiative) and their strategic implications.

Instruction includes international complicity with China’s oppressive policies due to a reliance on Chinese manufacturing and labor.

Instruction includes the obligations of corporations to report to the Chinese Communist Party.

Instruction includes the division of Korea after World War II, the Soviet Union’s Communization of North Korea, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.

Instruction includes the 1950 Soviet boycott of the United Nations that made possible the resolution deploying United Nations troops to support South Korea during the Korean War.

Instruction includes the United States’ and United Nations’ defense of South Korea, the role of China and the Soviet Union, violations of the Geneva Convention by the communist forces, the treatment of American POWs, and the war’s military and political outcomes (i.e., Demilitarized Zone).

Instruction includes the establishment of the Kim dynasty, the development of a totalitarian regime, severe human rights abuses, political repression, the 1990s North Korean Famine, and the role of state ideology (i.e., Juche).

Instruction includes comparisons of North and South Korea’s governance, economic performance, standard of living, and international relations (e.g., KORUS Agreement).

Instruction includes the rule of Ho Chi Minh, the role of the Viet Minh and Vietnam’s war for independence from France, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954.

Instruction includes land redistribution campaigns, forced collectivization, the execution of landlords, and broader class struggle policies.

Instruction includes the flight of hundreds of thousands from North Vietnam to South Vietnam.

Instruction includes the tactics of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.

Instruction includes the North Vietnamese invasion of Laos in 1958.

Instruction includes Domino Theory, which drove United States involvement in the region.

Instruction includes the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, the 1968 Tet Offensive, and subsequent response by South Vietnam and the United States.

Instruction includes the role of the media, propaganda, and protests in shaping public opinion in Vietnam and the United States about the war (e.g., Walter Cronkite, The Pentagon Papers, protests by Buddhist monks).

Instruction includes the outcomes of the United States’ withdrawal from the region (e.g., 1 million killed, re-education camps, “Vietnamese boat people”).

Instruction includes the Pathet Lao’s establishment of a communist government in Laos following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.

Instruction includes the effects of the Doi Moi reforms beginning in 1986 (e.g., shifting from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented one, promoting private enterprise, promoting foreign investment, increasing trade). 

Instruction includes the economic effects of modern ties between Vietnam and the United States. 

Instruction includes human rights abuses in Vietnam (e.g., political repression, restrictions on movement, use of violence, arbitrary arrests, lack of rights). 

Instruction includes Pol Pot’s rule, the establishment of an agrarian communist state, the Year Zero Policy, and the restructuring of Cambodian society. 

Instruction includes the Khmer Rouge’s targeted persecution of intellectuals, professionals, educated individuals, and any who were viewed as threats to the regime’s agrarian ideology. 

Instruction includes the Cambodian genocide, forced labor policies, and the mass murders in the Killing Fields that led to the death of approximately 2 million people or 25% of the Cambodian population. 

Instruction includes the Khmer Rouge’s conflict with Vietnam, the Vietnamese invasion that led to the regime’s collapse in 1979, and the subsequent establishment of a Vietnamese client regime in Cambodia. 

Instruction includes British efforts to suppress communist insurgencies in Malaya (i.e., the Malayan Emergency) and their counterinsurgency strategies (e.g., New Villages, “winning hearts and minds,” Operation Starvation).

Instruction includes anti-communist purges in Indonesia under Suharto, including mass killings and political repression.

Instruction includes the distinctively Asian economic model of state industrial policy, export-driven growth, forced savings, domestic protection, and opportunistic participation in the American-led global free-market system.

Instruction includes the dramatically greater economic growth and improvement in standard of living in the Asian state-capitalist countries as compared to Asian Communist countries. 

Instruction includes the later imitation by China and other communist states of the statecapitalist economic model.

Instruction includes the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Instruction includes the leading role of Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution including the assault on Cuartel Moncada on July 26, 1953, his 15-year jail sentence, Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me speech and subsequent amnesty, his stay in Mexico where he prepared an armed group for guerrilla warfare in Cuba with Che Guevara, his arrival in Cuba and the murder of 200 civilians in the mountains, and the execution of 5,000 people following his return to Havana.

Instruction includes the role of Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolution including his leadership of the guerilla forces in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains and executions of civilians.

Instruction includes the presidency of Manuel Urrutia and Castro’s appointment as prime minister.

Instruction includes Fidel Castro’s declaration of being a Marxist-Leninist (1961).  

Instruction includes the Cuban government’s nationalization of business, agriculture, and industry. 

Instruction includes the Cuban Exodus.

Instruction includes Che Guevara’s roles as President of the National Bank, as commander of La Cabaña prison, and in revolutionary tribunals. 

Instruction includes Manuel Artime and his preparations for an invasion of Cuba. 

Instruction includes the activities of Brigade 2506 and selection of the Bay of Pigs as the invasion point.

Instruction includes President John F. Kennedy’s cancellation of United States air support during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Instruction includes the exchange of medical supplies for prisoners held by Cuba. 

Instruction includes the proximity of Cuba to the United States and its relevance in the use of nuclear missiles.

Instruction includes the Soviet Union’s installation of missile platforms in Cuba, and the United States’ subsequent discovery of these platforms.

Instruction includes President John F. Kennedy’s response to the Soviet Union’s involvement in Cuba and the installation of a naval blockade around the island.

Instruction includes the secret agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to resolve the crisis and cease further United States intervention against the Castro regime.

Instruction includes the sinking of tugboat 13 de Marzo on July 13, 1994, which resulted in the deaths of 41 passengers.

Instruction includes the Cuban Air Force shooting down two aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue, the role of Juan Pablo Roque, the passage and application of the Helms-Burton Act, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1067.

Instruction includes the 2021 Cuban protests and subsequent government crackdown resulting in 5 deaths and 710 arrests.

Instruction includes Cuba’s compulsory military service and foreign interventions by Cuba during the Cold War (e.g., Angola, Ethiopia, Grenada).

Instruction includes Che Guevara’s desire to export the revolution and the exportation of guerilla movements to South America.

Instruction includes the establishment of the Pioneer Organization and Young Communist League, mandatory agricultural work and military instruction for students and student exchanges with other communist countries for the purpose of indoctrination.

Instruction includes the use of medical professionals and teachers to promote communist ideology while performing their services.

Instruction includes the usage of consulates and associations for the purpose of espionage, youth recruitment, and propaganda.

Instruction includes the foreign dissemination of a cult of personality for both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Instruction includes the societal prosperity, strong economy, and high standards of living that existed in Cuba prior to the Cuban Revolution.

Instruction includes human rights abuses of the Cuban government (e.g., freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press).

Instruction includes the use of censorship, fear, intimidation, and surveillance to control the population.

Instruction includes the harsh punishments inflicted on dissidents (e.g., imprisonment, physical abuse).

Instruction includes how Cuba’s tax-payer funded universal healthcare falsifies data to present favorable medical outcomes (e.g., low infant mortality rates).

Instruction includes Hugo Chavez and his oath at Samán de Güere.

Instruction includes the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200.

Instruction includes Hugo Chavez’s attempted coup d’etat against President Carlos Andres Perez (1992), Hugo Chavez’s imprisonment, and his later pardon by President Rafael Caldera.

Instruction includes the multiple leftist parties that exist within Venezuela.

Instruction includes how Hugo Chavez won the 1998 election.

Instruction includes how Hugo Chavez used calculated ambiguity to describe his ideological affiliation.

Instruction includes unsuccessful attempts to remove Chavez from power, including the Venezuelan coup d’etat attempt (2002) and the Venezuelan general strike (2002-2003).

Instruction includes the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Bolivarian Circles (party militias), abuse of voting machine technology (Smartmatic), and expropriation of private businesses.

Instruction includes Cuban support for Chavez’s regime, including medical assistance, support for security services, and Venezuelan oil exported to Cuba.

Instruction includes the result of hyperinflation and extreme deterioration of living standards, with a lack of basic necessities.

Instruction includes Venezuela’s economic decline due to price controls and the establishment and growth of social welfare programs.

Instruction includes Nicolas Maduro’s education in Cuba under the Communist Party, his career as Secretary of State and Vice President, and his ties with the Iranian government.

Instruction includes the National Assembly’s declaration of Juan Guaido as interim president, international recognition of Juan Guaido’s presidency, and the United States’ support of Juan Guaido.

Instruction includes the disqualification of Maria Corina Machado as a presidential candidate, the fraudulent nature of the 2024 Venezuelan Presidential Election and international recognition of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia’s victory.

Instruction includes political repression, media censorship, abuse against journalists (i.e., imprisonment and forced exile), and human rights abuses against Venezuelans.

Instruction includes the lack of transparency in Venezuelan elections and election fraud.

Instruction includes the lack of food, medicine, and basic services in Venezuela which has forced over 7 million citizens to flee the country.

Instruction includes radical non-communist movements in twentieth-century Latin America, including the Mexican Revolution and Justicialism (Peronism) in Argentina.

Instruction includes revolutionary socialist and communist movements (e.g., Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, the Shining Path in Peru, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Instruction includes the United States’ actions to oppose communism, including the Alliance for Progress and interventions in Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua.

Instruction includes the purpose of the Communist International for “world revolution and the overthrow of existing capitalist governments.”

Instruction includes the recruitment tactics of the Soviet-backed Communist Party. 

Instruction includes the trips to the Soviet Union for training, beginning in 1922 with Claude McKay and then followed by Lovett Fort-Whiteman. 

Instruction includes the communist assault on and takeover of the socialist movement in the United States.

Instruction includes the strategies of the Third Period (e.g., using demonstrations and strikes to inspire revolution, destruction, and absorption of other leftist parties, advocation of dual unions).  

Instruction includes how the Communist Party splintered the socialist movement into the Communist Party, the Communist Labor Party, and the Socialist Party by the end of 1920. 

Instruction includes the policies and conduct of the Communist Party of the United States of America under the leadership of Charles Ruthenberg, Jay Lovestone, William Z. Foster, and Earl Browder. 

Instruction includes front organizations of the Communist Party (e.g., African Blood Brotherhood, Sharecroppers Union, Unemployed Councils).

Instruction includes infiltration of other organizations and movements (e.g., Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Bonus Army). 

Instruction includes the recruitment of prominent individuals to spread propaganda (e.g., Nancy Cunard, Jane Fonda, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright).

Instruction includes attempts to censor speech through the Cain Plan and the opposition group, the American Writers Association. 

Instruction includes communist use of causes célèbres, including Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelo Herndon, the Scottsboro Boys, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Instruction includes the effects of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (e.g., mass defections from the American Communist Party and communist anti-war propaganda until the German invasion of the Soviet Union) and the shift in Communist Party policies regarding Nazi Germany, civil rights, labor, and military intervention after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Instruction includes Popular Front culture, including the Hollywood Ten, the Weavers, and Lillian Hellman.

Instruction includes the disillusioning effects of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech.

Instruction includes the role of defectors from communism in the anti-communist movement, including James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, Frank Meyer, and Richard Wright.

Instruction includes the roles of anti-communist politicians, including Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Joseph McCarthy.

Instruction includes American interactions with Soviet Russia under President Woodrow Wilson and President Herbert Hoover.

Instruction includes the Soviet Union’s use of diplomatic recognition by other nations during the 1920s to promote espionage and revolutionary politics.

Instruction includes support for seeking diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia, (e.g., trade to help the economy, the role of businesses, the Chamber of Commerce, and the role of The New York Times reporter Walter Duranty in shaping American perceptions of the Soviet Union).

Instruction includes the opposition to diplomatically recognizing the Soviet Union from such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution, labor unions, churches, the American Legion, and political leaders such as outgoing President Herbert Hoover.

Instruction includes recruitment strategies for communist front movements (e.g., deceptive labeling as a civil rights, art, or labor rights movement, and financial rewards to recruits).

Instruction includes the tactics of communist front groups to acquire power (e.g., organizing protests, mail campaigns, propaganda, and union-organizing in order to influence policy and legislation).

Instruction includes the range of communist front organizations, including the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the World Peace Council, the American Negro Labor Congress, the National Youth Congress, and the Civil Rights Congress.

Instruction includes sources of support for communist front organizations (e.g., the revelation of “Moscow gold” upon the opening of the Soviet archives, donations by wealthy individuals and donations from foundations infiltrated by communist sympathizers).

Instruction includes the purge of communists by organized labor, and the roles of Walter Reuther, Mike Quill, Joseph Curran, and Ronald Reagan.

Instruction includes those who worked to expose front groups (e.g., House Committee on Un-American Activities, and writers like George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, George Sokolosky, and Stan Evans).

Instruction includes communist spies (e.g., the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Stanley Graze, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, V. Frank Coe, and Harrold Glasser) and sympathizers (e.g., Harry Hopkins, Owen Lattimore).

Instruction includes the Amerasia Affair.

Instruction includes methods of espionage (e.g., recruitment strategies, copying government and technological secrets, network of agents, and methods of disseminating information).

Instruction includes how espionage harmed the United States (e.g., giving the Soviet Union an advantage in diplomatic talks and war strategy, use of military secrets obtained to kill American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s building of the atomic bomb).

Instruction includes the efforts to expose and prevent espionage (e.g., House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the McCarran Act and various political leaders such as Congressmen Hamilton Fish and Martin Dies, President Harry Truman, and Senator Joseph McCarthy).

Instruction includes efforts to ignore or downplay espionage in politics and popular culture.

Instruction includes America’s normalization of relations with Communist China and the Shanghai Communiqué.  

Instruction includes the Marxist origins of the Weather Underground and its bombing campaign.

Instruction includes academic normalization of historical communist violence and the reframing of communists as historical civil rights leaders (e.g., Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Louise Thompson Patterson).

Instruction includes the public’s changing perception of communist iconography in popular culture (e.g., Che Guevara on clothing).  

Instruction includes the differing motivations for NATO’s creation among the United States and European powers.  

Instruction includes NATO’s expansion into additional European states (e.g., Greece, Turkey, Germany, Spain). 

Instruction includes socialist anti-communism (e.g., United Kingdom’s Labour Party).  

Instruction includes liberal anti-communism (e.g., the Fund for the Republic, the Union for Democratic Action, the CIA front organization, Congress of Cultural Freedom, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom).

Instruction includes conservative anti-communism (e.g., Knights of Columbus, John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom, the American Legion, Jewish League against Communism).

Instruction includes religious anti-communism (e.g., Pope John Paul II).

Instruction includes anti-communist publications (i.e., The New Leader and the antidétente Washington Quarterly).

Instruction includes the United States’ desire to improve intelligence capabilities against the Soviet Union (e.g., espionage, spy planes, satellites).  

Instruction includes the use of covert actions as a counter to global communist expansion (e.g., CIA actions in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, and Francis Gary Powers and the 1960 U-2 Incident). 

Instruction includes the role of civilian control and Western legal and moral norms. 

Instruction includes the popularity of communist parties funded by the Soviet Union following World War II (e.g., France’s 1945 election, Italy’s 1948 election).  

Instruction includes the influence of the United States’ support for non-communist parties (e.g., Italy’s 1948 election). 

Instruction includes the role of the United States’ economic aid in stabilizing Western Europe (e.g., Marshall Plan). 

Instruction includes the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Instruction includes Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956.

Instruction includes the Soviet Union’s use of violence, which reduced faith that communism could be reformed or deliver on its promises.

Instruction includes the contrast between the post-war prosperity in the Free West and the Soviet Union’s increasing economic decay. 

Instruction includes Red-Green Alliances between communists and Islamists.

Instruction includes communist alliances with socialists (e.g., Popular Front Strategy, François Mitterrand’s government in France, Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela, Lula da Silva’s government in Brazil).

Instruction includes alliances between communists and terrorist organizations (e.g., Carlos the Jackal, Palestine Liberation Organization, Irish Republican Army, National Liberation Army in Colombia).

Instruction includes alliances between communists and academic groups or institutions.

Instruction includes the repackaging of Marxist ideology using modern terminology and concepts to disguise the underlying Marxism.

Instruction includes the dangers of propaganda disguised as entertainment or unbiased media.

Instruction includes campaigns to shut down the House Committee on Un-American Activities by communists and communist sympathizers, including protests in San Francisco in 1960 to disrupt the meeting.

Instruction includes a change in policy by President John F. Kennedy’s administration, forbidding explicitly anti-communist speeches in the military.

Instruction includes using “McCarthyism” as an insult and shorthand for all anticommunism.

Instruction includes slander against anti-communists, such as red-baiter and Red Scare.

Instruction includes the Soviet Union’s support for communist movements in developing nations and former colonies (e.g., Angola, Ethiopia, Iran).

Instruction includes radical Maoist movements in independent states (e.g., India, Nepal).

Instruction includes Cold War American pressure on European states to end their colonial empires to reduce the appeal of communism.

Instruction includes the strength of alternate traditions that limited the appeal of communism (e.g., religion, nationalism, economic freedom).

Instruction includes the Soviet Union and China as members of the Permanent Security Council and Cuba’s membership in the Human Rights Council.

Instruction includes communist nations securing the support of smaller nations in the United Nations through economic and military aid.

Instruction includes the role of communist politician Irina Bokova as the DirectorGeneral of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Instruction includes the dangers of sacrificing national sovereignty to international organizations that may support communist initiatives.

Instruction includes communist usage of social media to influence foreign nations (e.g., TikTok, Reddit, botnets, fake social media accounts).

Instruction includes products developed in communist nations that contain spyware.

Instruction includes the usage of the internet to organize “educational” content, recruitment, movements, and violent protests and to fundraise.

Instruction includes the ability to disguise the source of information to conceal its communist origins (e.g., front websites, fake social media accounts, online front organizations, fake job applications for remote positions).

Instruction includes differing estimates for communism’s death toll (i.e., The Black Book of Communism estimating ~100 million people killed, R.J. Rummel’s Democide estimating ~170 million killed between 1900-1987). 

Instruction includes the definition of democide as the intentional killing of unarmed or disarmed people by a government.

Instruction includes the unprecedented scale of the communist death toll.

Instruction includes visual representations of communism’s death toll.

Instruction includes intentional efforts to hide casualties by communist governments (e.g., lack of record keeping, destruction of evidence, limiting mobility to prevent the spread of information).

Instruction includes data manipulation to manipulate public sentiment by communist governments (e.g., acts of genocide being justified as self-defense, attributing deaths to disease, drought, or malnutrition).

Instruction includes the silencing of dissidents by communist governments.

Instruction includes the intentional minimization of communist atrocities by communist-aligned Western scholars.

Instruction includes the difficulty of assessing accurate casualty numbers within a changing political landscape (e.g., Poland’s annexation by the Soviet Union).  

Instruction includes communist promises of peace, safety, economic security, wellbeing, property, representative government, and improved living conditions (e.g., Lenin’s promises of “Peace, Land, and Bread”).

Instruction includes the realities of starvation, shortages, constant fear, poverty, low life expectancy, and totalitarian rule.

Instruction includes resources being used primarily for the benefit of the state and ruling elite and not for the general population.

Instruction includes how forced collectivization fosters a dependency on the government. 

Instruction includes how forced collectivization removes an individual’s desire to seek incentives or rewards for work.

Instruction includes how forced collectivization removes the ability to own private property. 

Instruction includes how forced collectivization requires mass surveillance to maintain itself.

Instruction includes how forced collectivization promotes internal divisions within communities and families, and the resulting psychological effect on individuals (e.g., higher rates of alcoholism, depression, suicide).  

Instruction includes how forced collectivization mandates where an individual works and lives.

Instruction includes how widespread individual freedom is incompatible with communism.

Instruction includes how the communist state has absolute authority to override any individual rights.

Instruction includes that communist governments consistently strip individuals of rights and freedoms (e.g., speech, religion, press, assembly, fair trial, property, bearing arms, contract, familial autonomy, political affiliation, privacy).

Instruction includes that the United States Constitution guarantees equal application under the rule of law (e.g., 4th Amendment, 5th Amendment, 6th Amendment, 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause).

Instruction includes the arbitrary application of the law in a communist state (e.g., show trials, rampant governmental corruption, weaponization of the judicial system against real and perceived enemies, summary executions, GULAG System).

Instruction includes the broken promise of equality under a communist system.

Instruction includes the disparity of the standard of living between the ruling elite of the Communist Party and the people (e.g., access to healthcare, wealth, employment, housing, possessions, access to food).

Instruction includes the abject poverty experienced by the general population in a communist system.

Instruction includes the role of personal incentives in promoting and achieving economic prosperity.

Instruction includes how an individual’s economic prosperity leads to societal economic prosperity.

Instruction includes the economic disparity between nations with property rights and those without property rights using gross domestic product per capita.

Instruction includes the reasons for Plymouth Plantation moving from a communal society to one of private ownership (e.g., the free-rider problem, Governor William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation).

Instruction includes Enlightenment philosophers who influenced the Founders conception of economic freedom (e.g., John Locke, Adam Smith, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon).

Instruction includes the role of Federalist No. 14 in determining the economic system of the United States.

Instruction includes that the U.S. government upholds its citizens’ natural rights.

Instruction includes that totalitarian governments consistently strip their people of individual rights and have absolute authority to do so.