How to Write a Novel About Communism Without Writing a Communism Bad Novel
Against Didacticism and Easy Answers to Complex Questions in Fiction
The aim of this post is not to dispense writing or craft advice but rather to provide a glimpse into what I emphatically do not want to accomplish as a writer. Though I insist that I am in no place to offer such advice as an unpublished nobody, if any of this resonates with you, feel free to take it as you wish.
I’m currently in the midst of writing a new novel. None of my previous ten or so novel attempts—most of which have been absolute garbage to be fair, which is par for the course for any serious novelist1—have been published, and yet I keep on keeping on, like Fitzgerald’s boats beating against the current, “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” or rather into the insanity that is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But unlike my previous work, this is a novel about communism.2 I like to think that it’s about more than that, but at first glance, this is definitely a “novel about communism;” there’s no way around that pat designation.
My main hope for this project, this “novel about communism” such as it is, is to avoid writing what I have come to term a Communism Bad novel. The trap is a very easy one to fall into when writing about this topic because most communist regimes were actually pretty bad in a lot of ways. But there’s a big difference between acknowledging the fatal flaws of state socialism and the atrocities committed in its name and what I’ve come to term the Communism Bad novel.
The Communism Bad novel is like pornography—you know it when you see it. It is a story painted in black and white, one of brave dissidents and anti-communist freedom fighters risking everything in their struggle for liberty, democracy, and Baskin-Robbins’ 31 flavors of ice cream in every supermarket. Their all-powerful but ultimately vanquished enemy is the monolithic totalitarian State, shrouded in secrecy and acting in pure, unadulterated uniform evil against our selfless, innocent protagonists. These novels shun nuance in favor of easy solutions to complex problems and promote a flattened, binary view of the world and of history that is at odds with reality itself. In their attempts to educate the wider reading public and promote a very particular sort of historical memory, authors of Communism Bad novels ironically end up creating their own inverted mirror image of socialist realism.3
Finally, while many people’s “lived experience” under communism is indeed one of Communism Bad,4 it is not the primary task of the novel, nor of fiction more broadly, to accurately represent “lived experience.” If you want to read about someone’s lived experience, read a memoir or another work of nonfiction.5 The primary task of the novel and of fiction, instead, is, among other things, to subvert archetypes and explore human nature at its messiest and most flawed, something that fiction focused solely on bearing witness to atrocity and oppression utterly fails to accomplish.6 Let the testimonies of real people (in memoir or courts of law, or to NGOs or journalists) speak for themselves, and let fiction be free of such a weighty obligation.
Identify (broadly-speaking) as a part of the center-left or left
A sure sign of a Communism Bad novel is its author’s quite obvious right-wing political leanings, which are manifested in a couple of key ways. First, the heroes tend to be members of the elite class that the Big Bad Commies have displaced, both physically and financially, and the problems these White (as opposed to the ruling Red) elites face are played completely straight—there’s no place for humor or satire when communism must be combatted! As in, we as readers are expected to feel incredibly sorry for them for having lost their many houses and vast fortunes. Perhaps a few decades ago, during the Cold War or the End of History era, we could lament these characters’ losses along with them, but in the current age of widespread staggering socio-economic inequality, rich people’s problems are just that.7
Another sign of an author’s right-wing politics is more vibe-dependent. As you read their work, you increasingly get the idea that they’re not critiquing the (authoritarian, totalitarian) State in state socialism but rather the socialism itself. This is when the novel turns into a preachy political tract, an op-ed of a book that cautions against the dangers of “big government” by comparing it to a given communist regime.8 If you want to rail against socialism and leftist political ideas, believe me there are far more profitable markets for that than fiction writing.
No conservative writer with any actual talent or literary merit has ever produced a Communism Bad novel9 and the novels that are used by the political right as examples of classic Communism Bad literature were, in fact, written by self-identified members of the political left (Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 come to mind). Even many well-known dissident writers who lived under totalitarian communist regimes10 appear to identify more with a democratic, humanist, and anti-authoritarian left-leaning sensibility rather than the partisan political right.
While I’m always hesitant to be prescriptive or to claim that something is the job or duty of any given writer, I do believe that anti-authoritarian politically left and center-left writers are in an excellent position to write about communism without falling into the aforementioned right-wing cliches. It really does take one to know one, and it takes a democratic left-wing or center-left person to critique the worst authoritarian excesses of their—our—own political tendency.
Subvert expectations
In a society that sought to eliminate egoism and self-interest, people living under communism were surprisingly selfish, and this naturally includes any dissidents or others engaged in active opposition to the regime. Dissidents can and should be “problematic,” flawed human beings. Perhaps the dissident is an uncaring asshole to those closest to him and only hates the regime because he didn’t get the promotion at work he wanted, or maybe she’s the daughter of a member of the secret police who must reconcile the love she feels for her father with the brutal regime he serves, or maybe there's even a member of the secret police who secretly opposes the regime for whatever reason.
These are just a few examples I came up with off the top of my head, but most of us are writers here so we have lots of room to be creative. The main thing is to not let readers get too comfortable with these sorts of characters which more than lend themselves to heroic mythologizing. No one in an authoritarian/totalitarian society is untainted by the regime—purity, ideological or otherwise, does not and cannot exist—and if a novel seeks to honestly examine and critique communism and other forms of authoritarianism/totalitarianism, then it would behoove it to recognize our innate adult human11 lack of innocence.
Exploit internal divisions
If there’s one thing the left excels at, it’s factionalism. There are about as many flavors of leftism as there are brands of soda that weren’t available for consumption in the socialist state, and anyone remotely familiar with left politics knows this. There are certain dynamics that are particular to the left, ones that outsiders, particularly right-wing or center-right outsiders, often cannot or do not pick up on, that lend themselves to such factionalism and the constant fragmentation that accompanies it.12
All of this is to say that much of the opposition to communism was really just in-fighting over how best to interpret the holy texts of state atheism (Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.), especially in the most hardline of societies where the emergence of an organic dissident movement was near to impossible due to the sheer degree of state control. The Prague Spring was reformist in nature, seeking to replace Soviet-style socialism with “socialism with a human face” (for example). Left fragmentation was also international in scale, with socialist Yugoslavia famously breaking from Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1948 to pursue a path of Non-Alignment. The regime, or even communism itself, is never a monolith, and any realistic portrayal must take the left’s inherent factionalism into account.
It’s not your job to educate
One of the first lessons I learned when I started getting serious about writing fiction, especially fiction about the sort of topics I’m drawn to, is that didacticism is the death of any good story. If readers wanted a history or political science lesson, they’d pick up a nonfiction book about a similar topic (there are many), or read someone’s opinion online (too many to count). Fiction writing is not the only way to educate or express your views about a given topic. If you want to write a PhD thesis, apply to graduate school. If you want to write an op-ed, pitch one to your preferred publication.
For more information on my opinions re: art and didacticism, see this piece, but suffice it to say, everything I wrote about Argentina 1985 also applies here. While work about communism will be read by some, or even most, readers as an “educational window to the past,"13 this should not be one’s first goal if one’s pretension is to create Art (with a capital A), or at the very least, not fall into predictable cliches (and unlike Argentina 1985, based on real life events as it is, fiction writers have the liberty to be far more creative).
Be realistic
People raised their whole lives under a totalitarian system that seeks to indoctrinate them into Marxist-Leninist ideology since birth are not going to randomly “see the light” one day and start subscribing to very Western (and specifically American at that) ideas about freedom, liberty, democracy, etc. A peasant or an average struggling everyman isn’t going to pine for Coca-Cola, blue jeans, and bananas and see the lack of such as the great, fatal flaw of state socialism (they have bigger problems, quite frankly). If anything, this complaint would likely have come from someone with a certain degree of privilege, a Party elite or adjacent, perhaps (and such complaints from the elites would make for a very interesting story, indeed). Some would perhaps even view the West and its own utopian promises with distrustful, uneasy eyes, even if they were opposed to communism.
Remembering real life is also important when writing a “novel about communism,” or authoritarianism/totalitarianism more broadly. No one feels oppressed 100% of the time, sunup to sundown, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not even in North Korea-style dictatorships. Nor do they constantly ruminate about how much they hate the regime to the exclusion of all else. People still celebrate birthdays, weddings, school graduations, and anniversaries (among other major life events), enjoy beautiful afternoons in the park, fall in love, get their hearts broken, have children, etc., all under the most oppressive and hopeless of circumstances, and that should be the story, not some imagined fantasy of constant, never-ending misery and suffering.
Lighten up
Finally, totalitarianism, especially in its M-L14 guise, is just plain funny at times.15 From the elaborate pageantry of May Day parades to the bombastic cults of personality built up around the most unremarkable of men.16 I'll wrap up this already too long post with the translated lyrics of the opening lines to perhaps one of the goofiest songs glorifying a dictator that I've ever heard ("Enver Hoxha Tungjatjeta," or "Long Live Enver Hoxha"):
Enver Hoxha sharpened his sword,
Once again for the situation,
This is the sword that hangs above the heads,
of all enemies around the world.
How is this not hilarious? Absurdist situational humor is, for me, a requirement for writing about the mechanisms of the totalitarian State, or of authoritarianism more broadly. Because sometimes, in the face of such derangement, all you can really do is laugh.
Your first efforts will suck. There’s no way around it.
Elevator pitch would be “House of Cards meets Succession but set in the final years of a hardline Stalinist regime.”
The horseshoe theory of art/aesthetics, if you will.
It goes without saying that people’s experiences of victimization and oppression by the State under communism or any other authoritarian regime should be treated with the utmost respect; my disdain for Communism Bad fiction should not be read as disdain for or belittlement of people’s real trauma.
The blurring of the line between fiction and memoir/nonfiction is one of the worst things to have happened to fiction as of late, in my opinion.
This doesn’t just apply to fiction about communist regimes. I could/might write a whole post about how Argentina’s last military dictatorship is portrayed in fiction written for non-Argentine audiences and the many similar tropes and traps it falls into, with few notable exceptions.
A special note about Romanov stories: while the murder of the Romanov family was tragic, most Romanov stories fall into the trap of romanticizing and glorifying Tsarist Russia and by extension, the Russian Empire, which, as the kids say today, isn’t a good look.
This comparison is beyond offensive to any actual victims of communist regimes, as if universal healthcare or raising the minimum wage is in any way similar to forced labor in a gulag or constant surveillance and harassment by the secret police.
Compare the work of Jorge Luis Borges (“liberal-conservative” in the Latin American sense, meaning right-wing, and noted supporter of the “PNR” military dictatorship in Argentina and Pinochet in Chile) and Ayn Rand, for example.
Examples include but are not limited to Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia) and friend of the Substack Ismail Kadare (Albania).
Children are the only innocent ones among us, really.
You haven’t lived unless you’ve seen fights online or in real life between Trotskyists, social democrats, Maoists, Titoists, Hoxhaists, etc.
Or present, I suppose, if the book centers on one of the handful of communist states that still exist.
Marxist-Leninist, because I’m too lazy to write it out fully.
Go watch The Death of Stalin right now if you haven’t already.
Literally “just some guy.”