The Cowardice of the Communist Party

The Revolution That Killed the King and Learned to Fear History

Communism is cowardly.

That statement sounds strange only because the twentieth century taught the world to confuse brutality with courage. Communist regimes have imprisoned millions, organized purges, deported populations, sent armies across borders, threatened nuclear war and demanded extraordinary sacrifices from the people they governed. Yet the willingness to expose other people to death is not the same thing as the willingness to expose oneself to an uncertain outcome, and once that distinction is made, the history of communist power begins to look very different.

The mature communist regime is not primarily a system organized to win heroic contests. It is a system organized to survive. Its political institutions, security services, military command, information architecture and eventually even its ideology converge upon a single overriding objective: the ruling organization must remain in power. Everything else, including territory, doctrine, prosperity, allies and sometimes even large portions of the population, can be treated as expendable if necessary. The one thing that cannot be voluntarily placed on the table is the continued existence of the Party itself.

This is why communist political history contains a curious combination of bellicose language and cautious strategic behavior. Communist governments have often been highly comfortable with revolutionary seizure, civil war, clandestine organization, proxy conflict, operations against substantially weaker opponents and violence against people whose capacity to retaliate has already been broken. What is far harder to find is a clean example of a mature Leninist state relying principally on its own political economy, entering a prolonged high-intensity interstate war against an industrial opponent of comparable or greater strength, accepting that the outcome might genuinely destroy the regime, and nevertheless carrying the contest through to decisive victory.

The reason is not simply military weakness. It lies much deeper, in the psychology of successful revolution itself.

The Wars Communism Prefers Not to Remember Clearly

The Soviet Union’s greatest military legend is victory over Nazi Germany, yet even this example becomes less useful as proof of autonomous communist power once the actual structure of the war is restored.

The Soviet Union did not enter the European war simply as an innocent anti-fascist state waiting to be attacked. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact contained a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and prepared the way for the destruction and partition of Poland. Germany invaded from the west on September 1, 1939; the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17. Moscow subsequently attacked Finland, occupied and incorporated the Baltic states, and seized additional territory in Romania. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the German-Soviet pact plainly as an agreement that paved the way for the joint invasion and occupation of Poland.

The Soviet state therefore participated in opening the European catastrophe and then, less than two years later, found itself facing the very regime with which it had divided Poland. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Germany expected to destroy the Soviet military within weeks, and the initial Soviet collapse was so severe that millions of Red Army soldiers were surrounded, captured or cut off.

The Soviet Union survived, adapted and eventually fielded a formidable army, but the military system that reached Berlin was operating inside an Allied industrial coalition much larger than the Soviet economy itself. American Lend-Lease eventually supplied the USSR with roughly 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks, enormous quantities of food and petroleum products, and the railway equipment, machine tools, metals and logistical inputs that allowed Soviet battlefield production to become sustained continental mobility. The significance of those deliveries was not that Soviet factories could not build tanks or artillery; it was that armies are not made from tanks alone, and the trucks, locomotives, food, fuel and industrial materials supplied by the United States filled precisely the kinds of bottlenecks a centralized war economy could not easily solve by simply ordering another million men to the front.

Soviet sacrifice was real, and no serious argument requires denying it. Soviet soldiers died in numbers almost impossible to comprehend, Soviet factories produced weapons on an extraordinary scale, and the late-war Red Army became one of the most destructive military organizations ever assembled. The narrower point is more damaging precisely because it requires none of those achievements to be denied: the communist world’s most celebrated great-power victory is still not a clean case of a communist political economy independently defeating a peer industrial civilization.

The Korean War is even more revealing because the communist side began with what appeared to be an extraordinary historical opportunity. Japan, which for decades had been the most important Asian military obstacle to Russian and later Soviet expansion toward the western Pacific, had been defeated, occupied and disarmed by the United States. The American military presence in South Korea had been sharply reduced, the South Korean state was militarily fragile, and the North Korean invasion in June 1950 almost destroyed it before American intervention reversed the collapse. Contemporary American assessments understood the communist objective as the destruction of the Republic of Korea and the incorporation of the peninsula under communist control.

What followed deserves more attention than the later mythology. North Korea, Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet Union together possessed the manpower of continental Northeast Asia, Soviet industrial support and weaponry, geographic proximity, a protected rear area in Manchuria and an enemy whose continued survival depended heavily upon an American decision to return. Yet the communist coalition still failed to eliminate South Korea. American intelligence later estimated that all Chinese communist aircraft and perhaps 90 percent of Chinese ground-force equipment and munitions used in Korea had been supplied by the Soviet Union, while Chinese offensives repeatedly lost momentum because their logistical system could not sustain the initial mass of men moving south. The armistice left standing the state the war had been intended to destroy.

This record becomes more striking when communist behavior is compared not with peaceful liberal states but with two political movements whose moral purposes and historical records were radically different from one another and from communism: National Socialism in Germany and the various Asian movements that entered the Pacific War under the broad language of Asian liberation from European empire.

The comparison is about risk, not virtue.

Nazi Germany was a criminal racial dictatorship responsible for catastrophic aggression and genocide, yet nobody can plausibly describe Hitler’s foreign policy as an effort to avoid existential bets. When Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Britain was still fighting, Germany had no guarantee that the USSR would collapse, and the campaign placed the future of the regime inside the largest land war ever attempted. Hitler and his commanders expected a rapid victory, but expectation is not certainty; the very decision to attack while Britain remained undefeated meant accepting a strategic gamble in which failure could bring Germany’s enemies together around a war of annihilation against the Reich. That is exactly what eventually happened.

This willingness to gamble everything does not make Nazism admirable. It makes it reckless, criminal and ultimately suicidal. Yet analytically it matters because courage and morality are different dimensions. A regime can possess monstrous objectives while still demonstrating willingness to expose itself to reciprocal destruction in pursuit of them.

The same distinction appears, in a very different moral and historical context, among Asian anti-colonial movements that cooperated with Japan during the Pacific War. Japanese imperial policy often subordinated local interests to Tokyo’s own strategic needs, and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere contained both genuine anti-colonial language and obvious structures of Japanese control. Even contemporary American assessments recognized the combination: Japan promoted “Asia for the Asiatics,” granted nominal independence to Burma and the Philippines, supported allied nationalist governments and attempted to use Asian nationalism against the European empires, while at the same time preserving decisive Japanese strategic power.

What matters here is that not every Asian participant was merely a passive Japanese puppet without independent political purpose. Subhas Chandra Bose reorganized the Indian National Army with Japanese support and committed it to an attempt to cross into India because he believed the war might provide a fleeting opportunity to break British rule. A scholarly history of the INA describes Imphal as the movement’s one real opportunity to cross the frontier and ignite an Indian revolution, an operation whose chances were anything but guaranteed. Aung San and the Burmese nationalists who became the core of the Burma Independence Army likewise trained with Japanese assistance and entered Burma alongside Japanese forces against British colonial rule before later turning against Japan when their interests diverged.

By 1943, representatives connected to Burma, the Philippines, India, Manchuria, Thailand and the Wang Jingwei government gathered in Tokyo for the Greater East Asia Conference, where Japanese officials hoped to present a coalition of Asian states and movements capable of fighting Britain and the United States and eventually operating in a postwar Asian order. Their political circumstances differed, their freedom of action differed, and several of those governments existed only because Japanese arms made them possible, but the larger psychological contrast remains important: many of the people drawn into these anti-colonial projects could not possibly know that they would win. India was still ruled by Britain, Burma remained a battlefield, European empires still possessed enormous global resources and the United States had an industrial capacity far beyond Japan’s. They acted anyway because they believed an uncertain historical opening might be worth the risk.

The point is not that reckless war is admirable, nor that Axis ideology and Asian anti-colonialism were equivalent. They emphatically were not. The point is narrower and more uncomfortable for communist mythology: other twentieth-century ideological movements repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to enter historical contests in which their own destruction was a real possibility, whereas mature communist systems became increasingly interested in forms of conflict in which risk could be displaced, hidden, deniable or imposed on somebody else.

That preference was already present in the organizational culture of international communism. The Communist International was established in 1919 explicitly to foment world revolution, and the small, frequently illegal communist parties it supported across the world looked to Moscow for guidance and resources. The Library of Congress description of the Comintern archives notes both this objective and the extraordinary global network of subordinate organizations it created. Soviet intelligence made extensive use of this environment; the Venona record later demonstrated widespread Soviet espionage in the United States and Britain and the assistance that communist parties in target countries could provide to Soviet intelligence operations.

Espionage, clandestine cells, front organizations, covert financing, political infiltration and proxy movements were not incidental embarrassments at the edge of communist history. They were natural instruments for a movement whose organizational genius lay in obtaining disproportionate political effect while minimizing open exposure of the center itself.

Communism became highly skilled at entering somebody else’s political system through the basement.

It was much less eager to meet an equal opponent at the front door.

The Revolution That Discovered the Guillotine

The reason can be traced to a lesson older than Bolshevism itself.

The French Revolution taught subsequent revolutionaries two things simultaneously, although revolutionary mythology usually remembers only the first. It showed that an old regime could actually be destroyed, that a king could be stripped of sacred authority, arrested, tried and executed, and that institutions which had presented themselves as permanent could collapse under organized political force. Yet the Revolution also showed that the killing would not necessarily stop with the king. Girondins were destroyed, Danton and his allies went to the guillotine, Robespierre followed them, and political machinery built against the enemies of the Revolution repeatedly turned against people who had themselves made the Revolution possible.

The old warning that revolutions devour their own children therefore described more than the violence of the French Terror. It exposed a succession problem at the center of revolutionary politics: whoever demonstrates that the ruler can be killed simultaneously teaches the next generation how to kill him.

The intellectual connection between the French revolutionary tradition and Russian Bolshevism was explicit. Russian revolutionaries had debated Jacobinism for decades, and Lenin responded to comparisons between revolutionary social democracy and Jacobinism not by rejecting them but by declaring in 1904 that “a Jacobin is a revolutionary Social-Democrat.” During the crisis of 1917, the political vocabulary of the French Revolution permeated Bolshevik arguments about power, dictatorship and the timing of insurrection.

The relationship became even more revealing once the Bolsheviks won. They began fearing their own Thermidor.

Historian Jay Bergman has shown how deeply Soviet political thinking remained haunted by the French revolutionary precedent, particularly by the possibility that the Russian Revolution might undergo a Thermidorian reversal before socialism had reached its promised destination. For Bolshevik factions that accused one another of betraying the Revolution, Thermidor increasingly became another word for counter-revolution, because every successful revolutionary understood the same disturbing possibility: the political process might continue after his victory, and if it continued long enough, it might eventually continue without him.

That is the decisive reversal.

Before victory, the revolutionary owns almost nothing and can therefore rationally gamble almost everything. After victory he possesses ministries, secret police, factories, military commands, official residences, privileged families, social status and ultimately an entire state. The man who once insisted that no existing order deserved unconditional preservation suddenly becomes the person in society with the strongest material and political interest in declaring one particular order permanent.

Yevgeny Zamyatin saw the inversion almost immediately. In We, D-503 insists that the revolution which produced the One State was the last revolution and that there can never be another. I-330, the woman who draws him toward rebellion, uncertainty and the outside world, responds with the logic of mathematics: if numbers have no final number, why should history contain a final revolution? George Orwell considered the exchange important enough to reproduce when he reviewed Zamyatin’s novel in 1946.

The insight goes beyond the familiar observation that dictators dislike opposition. The successful revolutionary ultimately wants to abolish the historical rule that enabled his own success.

Arthur Koestler reached the same conclusion from inside the communist experience. Near the end of Darkness at Noon, Rubashov recognizes the principle through which the new revolutionary generation has justified almost everything: the bastion must be preserved. The devastating question follows immediately—what has happened inside the bastion? The fortress continues to exist, but the purpose for which it was supposedly constructed has disappeared, until preservation itself replaces the revolutionary promise.

At precisely this point, the most radical political movement becomes one of the most conservative political systems imaginable.

Not conservative in religion, culture or economics, where communist regimes may remain enormously destructive, but conservative in the literal political meaning of preserving the existing distribution of power. The movement that once proclaimed that history must remain open constructs a state whose deepest command is that history must stop here.

The fundamental design principle of mature Leninism can therefore be expressed in a sentence much simpler than Marxist theory:

The king must never be killed again.

Violence Is Not Courage

This distinction also explains why communist brutality is so easily mistaken for communist courage.

A government can possess extraordinary capacity to imprison, deport, starve, purge or kill people whose ability to retaliate has already been destroyed while remaining deeply frightened of situations in which violence becomes reciprocal. Stalin could eliminate domestic enemies on an enormous scale without allowing those enemies an equivalent opportunity to destroy Stalin’s state. Maoist campaigns could impose catastrophic costs upon civilians after every independent institution capable of organizing serious political resistance had already been dismantled.

Such violence demonstrates coercive capacity. It does not demonstrate willingness to gamble the ruling system.

Political courage begins only when the other side can determine the outcome as well.

This distinction becomes even more important as communist systems weaken, because weaker communist regimes may become less willing, not more willing, to employ spectacular mass killing. Contemporary Chinese political repression relies heavily on surveillance, preventive disruption, selective detention, administrative punishment, pressure on relatives and information control, all designed to dismantle autonomous organization before a crisis reaches the scale at which the regime would have to test the loyalty of its entire coercive machinery.

There is no need to romanticize this evolution as liberalization. A less flattering interpretation is that precise repression is cheaper and safer than mass terror.

A massacre forces a government to discover whether soldiers will obey, whether commanders will remain united, whether bureaucrats will implement exceptional orders, whether elite families will continue supporting the center, whether foreign capital will remain, whether the outside world will respond, and whether violence intended to restore order will instead persuade millions of people that the state has become afraid. Preventive policing avoids asking all of those questions at once.

China’s own official doctrine makes the hierarchy unusually clear. The 2025 national-security white paper places political security first, defines its core in terms of regime security and system security, and identifies preservation of Communist Party leadership and ruling status as fundamental. China’s National Defense Law likewise places the armed forces under Communist Party leadership and assigns them a mission in strengthening Party rule and the socialist system.

“Party commands the gun” is therefore not a ceremonial phrase inherited from guerrilla mythology. It describes the first constitutional condition imposed upon Chinese military power: whatever else the gun can do, it must never acquire a political identity independent of the Party.

This becomes important when considering the extraordinary military resources accumulated by the People’s Republic. Aircraft carriers, submarines and ballistic missiles were obviously not secretly constructed for domestic policing, and reducing every Chinese weapons program to internal repression would be absurd. Yet any military asset acquires an additional political meaning once a Leninist state enters a succession crisis, fragmentation crisis or civil conflict, because the decisive question immediately becomes who controls it. A missile force created to deter America, an airfield constructed for Taiwan operations, a logistics network justified by maritime war and a theater command built for foreign conflict all become internal political resources if the center itself begins to fracture.

Weapons do not have to be built for civil war to become the inheritance over which a civil war is fought.

The Leninist military therefore contains a permanent contradiction: it must be professional enough to fight foreign enemies but politically dependent enough that it can never become an autonomous political actor capable of determining who governs. In ordinary periods the contradiction can remain hidden, but during a true regime crisis the Party confronts a question more important than operational efficiency: if the interests of the ruling organization and the survival of the larger political territory no longer appear identical, which one does the army obey?

The Communist Party has already written its preferred answer into law.

Real War Gives the Enemy a Vote

The same logic explains why communist governments can sound extraordinarily martial while displaying much narrower appetites for genuine strategic uncertainty.

Military parades, historical films, exercises, missile tests, diplomatic ultimatums and controlled border pressure can all deliver part of the political utility of war while allowing the government to retain control over the ending. A parade cannot be sunk, an exercise terminates when the leadership orders it to terminate, a propaganda film never unexpectedly loses air superiority, and a threat can be intensified or quietly reduced according to political convenience.

Real war destroys that privilege because combat makes causality plural.

The enemy chooses. Financial markets choose. Shipping companies choose. Insurers choose. Foreign governments choose. Military commanders encounter physical facts that cannot be censored before they occur. Families receive bodies rather than television footage. Investors move before receiving permission. Elite factions recalculate their futures. Every actor introduced into the conflict reduces the Party’s monopoly over what happens next.

Real war turns reality itself into an opposition party.

That is why the Taiwan question cannot be analyzed as though Beijing were considering a bilateral contest against Taipei. Taiwan is not legally part of Japan, but in the contemporary western Pacific security structure Japan functions as the closest thing Taiwan possesses to a regional strategic protector. Taiwan lies beside Japan’s southwestern island chain, the American bases most relevant to a Taiwan contingency are concentrated in Japan, and Japanese security policy increasingly treats the stability of the Taiwan Strait as directly connected to Japan’s own survival and to the credibility of the U.S.–Japan alliance.

In this practical geopolitical sense, Japan occupies toward Taiwan something resembling a protector or suzerain role without possessing legal sovereignty over it. The distinction matters because the military consequence is unmistakable: Beijing cannot safely assume that a major Taiwan war will remain “China versus Taiwan.” Once the conflict crosses a certain level of intensity, Taiwan leads into Japan, and Japan leads into the United States.

For an ordinary great power this would already be a formidable military problem. For a Leninist party-state it is something more dangerous, because the question would cease to be whether China possesses enough missiles, ships or aircraft to inflict enormous damage. The real question would become whether the Communist Party is prepared to place its economic model, elite coalition, military prestige and monopoly of political authority inside a process whose conclusion would be determined partly in Taipei, Tokyo, Washington and financial markets beyond Beijing’s reach.

Nothing in the mature Communist Party’s institutional history suggests enthusiasm for that experiment.

This does not mean miscalculation is impossible. Governments routinely begin wars they believe will be short and discover that reality has other plans, and no structural theory can prevent a leader from making a catastrophic mistake. Yet this is why the endless speculation about whether Xi Jinping personally “wants” to invade Taiwan is less illuminating than it first appears. Xi governs an organization whose declared first priority is regime security, whose military answers to that organization, whose governing elite has accumulated enormous interests worth preserving, and whose political structure contains no safe mechanism through which catastrophic military failure merely produces a defeated cabinet and a new election.

A democratic government may lose a war, lose an election and leave office while the constitutional state continues.

A Leninist ruling party has no equivalent exit.

Military humiliation can therefore become not simply the defeat of a government but a challenge to the proposition that the Party should continue ruling at all.

The cost of defeat is existential.

This is also why Japan has become such a useful enemy for Beijing’s domestic political system. Japan can be denounced at extraordinary volume because historical memory gives anti-Japanese propaganda enormous emotional power, yet modern Japan is deeply integrated into the American alliance and industrial architecture, which makes uncontrolled war with it exceptionally dangerous. Japan is therefore almost an ideal propaganda enemy: dangerous enough to sustain permanent mobilization, but embedded in a larger system strongly enough to make actual war an unattractive gamble.

The Communist Party can denounce Japanese militarism, fly aircraft and sail ships through contested spaces, stage exercises, make threats and present itself domestically as the guardian of historical justice without doing the one thing that matters most: surrendering control over the next move to Japan, Taiwan and the United States.

The louder the performance becomes, the easier it is to mistake volume for courage.

The opposite may be closer to the truth.

Communist governments do not fear war because war contains violence. They have never possessed a principled objection to violence. They fear the kind of war in which violence ceases to belong exclusively to them.

The King Remembers the Guillotine

The deepest source of communist cowardice therefore lies neither in contemporary Chinese nationalism nor in the personality of Xi Jinping, but in the revolutionary inheritance itself.

The revolutionary begins by learning that rulers can fall, that apparently permanent institutions are often theatrical, that soldiers can change allegiance, elites can defect, ordinary people can discover their numbers and a political order which looked immovable one month can disappear the next. These discoveries make revolution possible, but once the revolutionary becomes the ruler they become unbearable knowledge.

He knows the king can die because he helped kill the king.

This is why communist political history returns obsessively to counter-revolution, deviation, infiltration, conspiracy, political security and internal enemies. It explains the Bolshevik fear of Thermidor, Zamyatin’s vision of a state insisting that humanity had already experienced its final revolution, Koestler’s reduction of mature revolutionary logic to preservation of the bastion, and Beijing’s contemporary insistence that political security begins with regime security.

Every generation invents new administrative language because every ruling class prefers to believe its anxieties are unprecedented, yet the underlying fear changes surprisingly little.

Communism therefore undergoes one of the great reversals of modern politics. It begins as a doctrine insisting that no existing institution is sacred enough to escape history and ends as a system insisting that one particular institution must escape history at almost any price. It begins by romanticizing risk and ends by designing institutions to eliminate risk. It begins with revolutionaries who own little and therefore can gamble everything, and matures into a ruling class that effectively possesses an entire state and therefore finds genuine uncertainty increasingly intolerable.

This is what makes “cowardice” more than an insult. It describes the widening gap between the regime’s celebration of sacrifice and its own willingness to become the object of sacrifice, between the violence it can impose on weaker actors and the reciprocal danger it is prepared to endure, and between its theatrical fascination with war and its appetite for a war whose ending cannot be written in advance.

As communist power weakens, that cowardice may become more visible rather than less. Large-scale killing becomes more dangerous when obedience is less certain, external war becomes more dangerous when economic resilience is lower, military defeat becomes more dangerous when political legitimacy has narrowed, while threats become louder precisely because threats preserve something that actual war necessarily destroys: the right to decide when the performance ends.

The Soviet Union eventually discovered that the bastion could disappear without a final heroic battle at all. Beijing has studied that collapse obsessively, but the lesson it drew was not that political systems should learn how to lose, retire or surrender power peacefully. The lesson was that the Party must never permit itself to enter a situation in which losing becomes a legitimate possible outcome.

The revolution that celebrated the death of kings therefore arrived, after a century of purges, intelligence networks, proxy wars, security bureaucracies and military parades, at a political principle more conservative than anything its founders claimed to be overthrowing.

The man who kills the king learns something nobody else can forget for him.

Kings can be killed.

Once he becomes the king, almost everything that follows is an attempt to make sure it never happens again.