Inside the Red World: 27 Intriguing Facts about Communism

Former Chinese President Yang Shangkun told his doctor before his death that the crackdown on June 4 (Tiananmen Square) had been the Communist Party's "most serious mistake in its history, a mistake he couldn't correct but which would eventually be corrected." He had initially opposed the use of force on students.

In 1991, a fake Russian TV program on Leningrad TV convinced many citizens that Lenin consumed a lot of psychedelic mushrooms, eventually even becoming a mushroom himself. The Leningrad communist party had to declare that “Lenin could not have been a mushroom” because “a mammal cannot be a plant.”

In 1950, residents in Mosinee, Wisconsin held a mock Communist invasion that had concentration camps, a purged library, and inflated prices. The mayor, seemingly unaware of the plan, died due to the excitement.

The Pixar film Coco, which features the spirits of dead family members, got past China's censors with 0 cuts. In China, superstition is taboo due to the belief that spiritual forces could undermine people’s faith in the communist party. The censors were so moved by the film, they gave it a full pass.

Boris Yeltsin’s first trip to a Texas grocery store in 1988 shattered his belief in communism. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."

During the Bodo League Massacre of 1950, more than 100,000 suspected communists were killed by the South Korean government. US, Australian, and British officials witnessed and photographed the political genocide.

During the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” of 1956, China allowed and encouraged people to speak freely and openly express their opinions about the communist regime. After a year, the campaign was withdrawn and the Chinese government imprisoned those who spoke critically about them.

When the Monopoly game was introduced to communist Czechoslovakia, private businesses were illegal and mortgages didn’t exist, so they turned it into a horse racing variant.

In the late 1980s, young punk rockers in Cuba, known as “Los Frikis,” were so fed up with the stifling life of the communist regime that they chose to inject themselves with the AIDS virus so they could live in a sanitarium and be free from constant police-state harassment.

Out of the 10,000 members of the Communist Party USA in 1957, 1,500 were FBI informants.