Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry. Anti-communism has been an element of many movements and different political positions across the political spectrum, including anarchism, centrism, conservatism, fascism, liberalism, nationalism, social democracy, socialism, leftism, and libertarianism, as well as broad movements resisting communist governance. Anti-communism has also been expressed by several religious groups, and in art and literature.
Polish anti-communist activists with a banner reading "Down with Communism" during a Śląsk Wrocław football match in March 2012
White propaganda poster "For united Russia" representing the Bolsheviks as a fallen communist dragon and the White cause as a crusading knight.
The Freikorps were anti-communist right-wing paramilitaries (which were essential in fighting against and dismantling the communist revolution in Germany between 1918 and 1919) who are widely seen as a precursor to Nazism and responsible for the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Mussolini and the Fascist paramilitary Blackshirts' March on Rome in October 1922
Communism is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.
Thomas More, whose Utopia portrayed a society based on common ownership of property
Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union and the leader of the Bolshevik party
Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and a key figure in the October Revolution
Communist flag at night at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, year 2024