Communism in Australia -- False Promises

Abstract

The attraction of Communism was powerful enough in the mid 1940s to persuade over 20,000 Australians to call themselves Communist. The apparent success of the Russian Revolution that handed victory to the Russian proletariat had inspired radicals and revolutionaries everywhere, Australia included. That success was considerably boosted by the heroic efforts of the Red Army during World War 2.
By 1960 membership of the Communist Party of Australia had begun to dwindle until insufficient numbers forced the Party to disband in 1990. The rapidity of the decline in Australia and elsewhere is often explained as due to the realisation that what Lenin and later Stalin had created out of Marx’s ideas was in fact a contrivance, an artifice for pursuing political and other gains.
This paper will explore the extent to which some Australians became convinced that Communism offered a better way of life and why they embraced it. Negotiating the twists and turns of Soviet policy and actions and to rationalise these was a necessary part of being a believer. But as events in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere exposed the truth about Soviet intentions the rejection of Communism proved for many to be a painful journey.