Memoirs from inside communist rule, read aloud and discussed.
Stories of Communism builds its episodes around memoirs by people who lived under communist governments. Host Eric Seligman and co-host Manuel Castaneda read passages and talk about what they show, with books ranging from the autobiography of Stalin's daughter to a Soviet doctor's darkly comic account of a small-town Moldovan hospital.
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Stories of Communism looks at communist rule from ground level, through the memoirs of people who lived under communist and socialist governments. Host Eric Seligman and co-host Manuel Castaneda usually build an episode around one book. They read passages aloud, summarize the rest and share their reactions. It feels more like a shared reading than a lecture. The books cover a lot of ground. 'A View From The Top' reads from the autobiography of Joseph Stalin's daughter. The hosts say openly that her secure, privileged life at the top of a murderous system limits their sympathy for her. Even so, the passages they read show a father who could not be talked out of it once he had decided someone was an enemy. The discussion also touches on how children in the Stalin years were encouraged to inform on their parents. 'The Miracles of Socialist Healthcare' is lighter in tone. Its source is Communist Days, a former Soviet doctor's memoir of his first job as a pediatrician in a small Moldovan farming town in the 1960s, and the host calls it darkly hilarious. The book makes its case through absurd details rather than statistics: dead flies in the milk kitchen, an inspection report that hurts the doctor's standing with well-connected local officials, and a scripted village tour for foreign professors. On China, 'They Never Make Mistakes' reads from To the Edge of the Sky, a memoir by a woman born around the time Mao's regime took power who lived through its upheavals. Some of those passages describe severe abuse of young people by rural production brigade leaders. 'The Reality of Chinese Organ Harvesting' breaks from the usual format. It plays audio highlights from an Anti-Communism Action Team webinar with the former political prisoner Jennifer Zhang and David Kilgore, a former member of the Canadian Parliament. Cuba comes in through Nelson Rodriguez Chartrand, a dissident who fled the island, settled in Brazil and has been interviewed on the show before. His short book, La Revolucion de las Promesas, argues that Cuban schools fall far short of the government's claims, and the episode asks whether international bodies that praised them took that into account. The show's point of view is always clear. It keeps returning to outsiders who admired these systems, from visitors to Soviet Russia whose guides told them to look past the poverty to the American leftists who praise Cuba today. Links to the books are in the show notes at storiesofcommunism.com, and most episodes end with the same sign-off, calling it the day's story of communism. A good place to start is 'Our Favorite Stories', where the two hosts count down their favorite stories from six years of the podcast.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants the history of communist regimes told through personal accounts rather than policy analysis, and who is comfortable with an openly anti-communist point of view and frank descriptions of abuse.
What sets it apart: Instead of arguing about ideology in the abstract, most episodes are built on one specific memoir, read in the author's own words and linked in the show notes, so the history comes across as individual experience.
Welcome to Stories of Communism, a podcast for people of all ages where we explore the realities of life under Communism, as described in the memoirs, stories, and novels created by those suffering under this system over the past century. (Feedback email [email protected]).
Dead flies in a Soviet milk kitchen: hard to romanticize once you've looked inside.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A 50th-episode countdown sets forbidden love beside memoirs of poverty and the gulag.
Stories of Communism marks its 50th episode with a countdown of ten favorite stories from six years on the air, giving the hour a built-in sense of reflection and choice.
A memoir of Mao's China becomes a focused study of privilege, coercion, and betrayal inside one family.
Anwa Gao's memoir gives Stories of Communism a human scale. Born around the time Mao's regime took power in 1949, she grew up inside a revolution that promised classlessness while quietly preserving privilege.
A Cuban dissident's translated account brings education and health care promises down to classrooms and hospital wards.
Stories of Communism 48 follows Nelson Rodriguez Chartrand's translated account of Cuba into the places where political promises are supposed to become daily life: schools, universities, and hospitals.
A Stalin family memoir reveals how suspicion and political fear entered private life.
Svetlana Aleluyeva's memoir gives Stories of Communism a close, personal way into Stalin's Soviet Union. Here, Stalin is not only a dictator but a father remembered through lively early family scenes, suspicion, and abrupt rage.
A former Soviet doctor's village memoir traces medical duty, shortages, and party-managed appearances with dark humor.
Free medical school and mandatory crop-harvesting labor set up the episode's main friction: access to training exists alongside favoritism, shortages, and bureaucratic rot.
Stories of Communism 50 is a countdown from Eric Seligman and Manuel Castaneda, recorded from Wichita, Kansas and Oregon, marking the show's 50th episode.
Stories of Communism 49 covers Anwa Gao's memoir, To the Edge of the Sky, from Mao's takeover in 1949 through her 1985 arrest by the State Security Bureau.
Nelson describes a Cuban health system where MRI waits can take six months and bribes exceed a monthly salary.
Stories of Communism 47, "A View from the Top," centers on Svetlana Aleluyeva’s memoir *20 Letters to a Friend* and Eric Seligman’s reading of Stalin’s family life in the USSR.
Stories of Communism 46 follows Vladimir Tsisis's memoir Communist Days, set in Gradiesti, a small Moldovan farming town where he worked as a pediatrician after medical school.
Eric Seligman and Manuel Castaneda examine Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights, a novel set in fictional Ibansk.
Joe Sismazia recounts growing up amid wartime destruction and postwar hunger in Hungary, where his family scavenged for food.
Stories of Communism 43 examines Eugene Yelchin’s middle school novel Breaking Stalin’s Nose, set in Stalin’s Soviet Union in the early 1950s.
This episode discusses allegations of forced organ harvesting by the Chinese Communist government, featuring interviews with a former political prisoner and a researcher.
An interview with Teodor Flanta about his life as a spy for communist Romania and his later career in international espionage.
This episode reviews the memoir of Soviet dissident Arkady Polischuk, a Refusenik who used humor to navigate life under the USSR.
This episode discusses Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky's efforts to preserve documents and expose communist abuses after the fall of the Soviet Union.
This episode reviews Michael Levy's memoir 'Kosher Chinese' to explore whether Chinese communism still impacts daily life under modern reforms.
An interview with a former Solidarity leader about life in communist Poland and the protest movement.
This episode reviews the memoir of a Cambodian teenager who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, exploring the brutality and dehumanization under communism.
An interview with a Cuban dissident who taught capitalist ideas and fled the country.