the history of significant events that utilised in the development of communism

By Darcy Andrews

  • Welsh industrialist Robert Owen takes charge of a mill at New Lanark and develops it as an experiment in paternalistic socialism

  • The English socialist Robert Owen purchases New Harmony from the Rappists, to test his utopian theories in a new context

  • The young Friedrich Engels is sent from Germany to manage the family cotton-spinning factory in Manchester

  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meet in Paris and become life-long friends

  • At a congress in London Engels persuades a group of radical Germans to adopt the name Communist League

  • The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, is published in Paris with the ringing slogan: 'Workers of the world, unite!'

  • The First International is established in London, with Karl Marx soon emerging as the association's leader

  • Lenin and comrades launch in Munich a radical newspaper, Iskra ('the spark')

  • Lenin's supporters become known as the Bolsheviks ('majority') as opposed to the Mensheviks ('minority') after a split at the party's Second Congress

  • The first soviet ("council") of workers is set up in St Petersburg, introducing a word of great significance in Russian Communist history

  • world war I begins

  • The Bolsheviks take control of power in Russia and change their name to the Communist party

  • Communists seize power in Jiangxi province and establish the first soviet republic in China

  • Stalin achieves complete personal control in the USSR after removing all his rivals from the Politburo

  • anti-Communist coup enables Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) to set up a National Government in Nanjing

  • Mao Zedong wins control over the Chinese Communists during the Long March

  • Kim Il Sung leads a Communist guerrilla campaign against the Japanese occupation of Korea

  • In preparation for the invasion of Russia, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler set up Special Task Commandos (Einsatzkommando) to exterminate Communists and Jews

  • Mao Zedong becomes official leader of the Chinese Communist Party,

  • The Soviet army surrounds the Hungarian capital, Budapest

  • Ho Chi Minh proclaims the democratic republic of Vietnam

  • The Soviets instal a puppet government in Romania while the fight continues against Germany

  • Kim Il Sung becomes prime minister of North Korea on the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying force

  • The USSR grants nominal independence to east Germany as the newly established German Democratic Republic

  • The term Domino Theory is coined to reflect President Eisenhower's view of how states might fall to Communism

  • The East German government erects the Berlin Wall to prevent an exodus of its citizens

  • many communist states are successfully testing nuclear weapons.

  • The Soviet spacecraft Luna 10 orbits the moon and broadcasts the Internationale to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Part

  • berlin wall is domolished to signify the end of the cold war.

  • Eight more Soviet Socialist republics vote to join the three founder members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

  • The deformation of the soviet union

  • countries like north Korea, China and Cuba are still currently under communism to this day