(FP)  Gary Saul Morson: Communism–The Return of the God That Failed

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”

As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.

The God That Failed brought together several prominent European and American writers who had once either been members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but had eventually grown disillusioned. Each writer explained what initially attracted him to, and what eventually repelled him from, communism. The star-studded cast included Arthur Koestler, an Hungarian-born British writer now best known for his brilliant novel about communism, Darkness at Noon; French novelist André Gide; the Italian Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine; British poet Stephen Spender; and two Americans, journalist and author Louis Fischer, and African American writer Richard Wright.

Read it all.

The Return of the God That Failed https://t.co/Z9aUNSWmTy

— Collin Hansen (@collinhansen) July 27, 2026