Akshat Katoch. Mrs. Hollstein. Ap Lang. 16 March 2017.

In the long years between 1947 and around 1957, fear of communism froze the very voices of America into unison. A supposedly enlightened country, the United States of America succumbed to the mass hysteria of the Red Scare with shockingly little resistance. Communist “Reds” and Communist sympathizing “Pinks” were seen everywhere and were often persecuted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (also known by the inaccurate acronym HUAC). Many of these individuals’ only crime was that of sensibility; they saw the truth behind the terrifying chaos. One of the best records of this dark chapter in America’s history is its literature, which expressed opinion when it could be dangerous to do so. The American public’s paranoid fear of

In 1950 the emergence of the Second Red Scare’s driving force, Senator Joseph McCarthy, appeared and gave a speech proclaiming that America will soon be lost to communism if the people do not stand up to combat it. He revealed that night a list of 205 people working for Soviet Russia in the United States’ State Department whose intentions were to mold America from the inside to become a socialist nation. (Fitzgerald, p. 14) It was thanks to this newfound hysteria that began to break out thanks to McCarthy’s claims that the HUAC and other like-minded organizations began to gain momentum during this time period.

In 1917, Russia was crumbling into pieces. The World War I was draining all of Russia’s resources. There was shortage of food throughout the country, which left people starving. At the battlefront, millions of Russian soldiers were dying, they did not possess many of the powerful weapons that their opponents had. The government under Czar Nicholas II was disintegrating, and a provisional government had been set up. In November of 1917, Lenin and his communist followers known as the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and set a communist government in Russia. However, in 1924, Lenin died and Josef Stalin assumed leadership of the Soviet Union, which was the name for the communist Russia. Stalin was a ruthless leader who brought

American fears in the Cold War originated not only from Communism, but what it represented in American culture. After World War II, the popular culture demonizing the fascist regimes, the built-up aggression surrounding the system, began to move against Communism as tension between the USSR and America rose. Communism became viewed as a corruption; an infection that ruined the rugged individualism that Americans defined themselves by. Communism also, though its declaration of the evils of capitalism, decried Americans as living in an unequal society, that the United States lived in hypocrisy through its statements of liberty for all while it existed in a capitalist and segregated society. Americans saw the Soviet Union as the evil its heroic

McCarthy scared Americans into thinking they were next to be convicted of being a communist. Many Americans turned against each other by believing their next door neighbor was a communist. According to the article, “Thousands of alleged Communist in the U.S. were arrested and deported during what became known as the Red Scare. Neighbors did not trust one another after this event, imagine living next to a suspected Communist. The article states, “ McCarthy dropped a bombshell:The State Department is infested with Communist.” McCarthy shocked the media and the American people, McCarthy gained instant fame as this accusation sent shock waves through the nation. The tension that was already between America and the Soviet Union made

The Article Arthur Miller Mccarthyism shows suspicion because, “America was overwhelmed and concerned about threats of communism growing in Europe and China.” Joseph Mccarthy made a public accusation that over 200 communist had infiltrated the United States Government. Later in life, the accusations were proven to be untrue.

During the Cold War, one of the main fears of an American was being accused of being a communist. The “red scare” was a government task that made Americans fear losing their jobs and becoming enemies of the nation. In the 1950’s, a man named Joseph McCarthy came up with a list that had the names of “known” communists that invaded the American government. This led to the creation

In the 1950’s fear was installed into american citizens, this fear was known as McCarthyism. Which is known as the practice of making accusations of treason without proper evidence. Sam Roberts was a New York Times journalist who published the article “a decade in fear” in 2010. This published article was written about the crisis that occurred in the 1950s when John McCarthy turned Americans against each other. By the end of World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe and installed Communist puppet regimes in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany. The soviet union controlled most of the european continents after the civil war because they wanted to have a lot of power over people.

However, some level of caution by the American people was justifiable. The history of American Communism is not back and white, not from the view point of the communist sympathizers or anticommunists: numbers are exaggerated, motivations are altered, and stories will differ

In 1917, two revolutions completely changed the constitution of Russia. The Russian Monarchy was removed from power, placing Lenin and the Bolshevik party as the head of the newly formed Soviet Russia, resulting in the formation of the world 's first communist country. Traditional culture of the Imperial Russia was cast aside and a new Soviet culture began to take shape. The rise of the Bolsheviks ensued major reforms which predominantly focused on wide spread cultivation and spreading of Marxist-Leninist ideology throughout the whole of society. One of the most significant was the proclamation of a new philosophical idealism that strove to shape the populace, predominantly the proletariat, to develop a “New Man”. This philosophical notion, paired with the objectives and ideology of the Soviet administration, has been labelled as “The New Soviet Man”. Before 1917, a large percentage of the soviet population was illiterate and still accustomed to the old traditional ways. In order to combat this, the “New Soviet Man” was used as a medium in an attempt to eliminate old social norms which lingered from the former regime, and to try and develop new citizens for a new, communist society. Various means were used to attain this unification of social consciousness. Propaganda through the arts, literature, and education were considered the key channels to creating the ideal human being, the “New Soviet Man”, and so the Bolshevik reforms attempted to establish a Marxist-based

The rebellion of impoverished peasants with the help of a group of intellectuals changed the dynamics in the country. In 1917, the monarch of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne with a civil war. Lenin and Bolshevik Party took over the government and founded Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Now the private industry and land was under the control of the government and economic system was centralised. Bolshevik Party was following Karl Marx’s principles trying to make a socialist utopia come to life. After Lenin’s death Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky started to struggle for power over the country. Being a manipulative leader, Stalin won over and started to exploit his power. He purged or imprisoned many citizens who did not share the same political

In his Communist Manifesto Karl Marx claimed that “the history of all hithertho existing society is the history of class struggles… the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” In Russia, the proletariat class did in fact win; the year 1917 marked the beginning of a new era that for centuries has been ruled by the Romanov dynasty, a period during which the country produced some of the greatest poets, writers, painters and philosophers of all times. This great empire was radically transformed from tsarist autocracy to communism in the span of only a couple of months. The socialist workers, the Bolsheviks, that were able to seize the opportunity and overtake power, placed Russia on a path that forever altered the course of history and destroyed the lives of many citizens. Certainly, the Bolsheviks were not the only ones to blame for the changes that took place. Tsar Nicholas II’s leadership proved to be completely inefficient – he essentially allowed the working class to fully embrace their long-held desires to alter the political regime in Russia. Historians J.D. Smele and Bob McKean agree that the outbreak of the First World War simply expedited the rise of pre-existing trends, which have emerged as a result of shortfalls of Nicholas’s rule. Consequently, for at least a decade leading up to 1917 the workers were tempted to rise up against Nicholas and the ruling elite and in their view, establish a social order that should have in

The promises of state socialism and with it Communism were nothing short of fantasy turned reality for the deeply impoverished working classes of the Russian empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The uneducated and desperate people of the Russian empire were eager to believe in a social and political system that promised to finally deliver them from the crushing burdens placed on them by the aristocrats, capitalism and the class system. Unfortunately for them the reality of these new systems would be far from the promised utopian society of continuous prosperity and absolute equality. There would not be the freedom from the class system as promised by Communist propaganda instead in its place would be a less obtrusive and more industrialized version the class system that had existed before. Everyone would not share evenly the prosperity and wealth as promised either, instead those who were controlling the government would reap the greater rewards such as choice of living arrangements and top pick of academic endeavors. Those who had seized the government in the interest of the working class would not completely fulfil their promise to educate their working-class comrades to a level sufficient to take control of the government.

The Tsar and his elite began to understand that change was required before they lost complete control. By signing the October manifesto in 1905 Tsar Nicolas II turned Russia into a constitutional monarchy, gave its citizens civil rights and gave the Duma, Russia’s parliament legislative power. It wasn’t long before the 1905 revolution had died down, when Nicholas II disbanded the Duma and violated many of the civil liberties promises in the October manifesto. As a result of the Tsar reneging on his promises, by 1917 another revolution had begun, not only to highlight the lack food and civil rights as in the 1905 revolution but also from the violations of the October manifesto. In March of 1917 workers in Petrograd went on strike. Unlike the protests of 1905, the

In the beginning Communism seemed to the people of Russia as a utopian ideal. The promise of the elimination of classes, of guaranteed employment, "The creation of a comprehensive social security and welfare system for all citizens that would end the misery of workers once and for all." Lenin's own interpretation of the Marxian critique was that to achieve Communism there would first have to be a socialist dictatorship to first suppress any dissent or protest. Through coercive tactics this new government seized power and in 1917 Lenin came to power. Under his "rule" Russia underwent radical changes in it's economic doctrines adopting a mixed which was termed the New Economic Policy, also referred to as NEP. This