The Red Lion Pub, Soho: In the Shadow of Totalitarianism...

What once seemed so terrible, now seems amusingly quaint when compared to today's American politics.

The sign that Karl Marx stood under before entering his “Red” hangout in SoHo, London.

The Red Lion pub in SoHo is now a Be At One chain gastro pub, but back in the 19th century, it was a hangout for Karl Marx.

The Red Lion Pub: Karl Marx’s Local

Since coming to England four years ago, I have always considered the place a bit “socialist lite” — some Republicans prefer the name “nanny state” — but it’s still far from that, despite all the speed bumps. Of course, England is a capiltalist Constitutional monarchy — and getting more and more so by the day — however, England has semi-nationalized industries, good mass transportation (compare to America) and of course, the crown jewel of the Labour movement in England: the NHS, or national healthcare. England also had the Cambridge Five: a ring of spies hat passed information to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But even before the NHS and the Cambridge Five, England had Karl Marx, the exiled Prussian philosopher, and his beloved Red Lion Pub.

Built in 1793 on the corner of Great Windmill Street and Archer Street, the Red Lion was a key meeting spot for German political refugees, as well as the German Workers' Educational Society and the London branch of the Communist League. But the Red Lion pub earned its place in history by hosting both Karl Marx and Frederich Engels for lectures on the benefits of Communism and an “action programme’” for The Communist League, which upon its publication in 1848 became The Communist Manifesto. Marx never inspired full-scale revolution in England, but he certainly had his acolytes and was esteemed enough to be buried in the prestigious High Gate Cemetery. As for the Red Lion? Sadly, it became part of the Be As One pub chain that everyone chooses when they can’t think of anywhere else to drink.

The Next Communist-esque Dictatorship: America?

It was the moment for which I had been waiting since I landed in Bulgaria just three short weeks ago… and perhaps the moment for which I had waited for part of my childhood: standing in the shadow of a gigantic statue of Vladimir Lenin, much like the ones I once saw flashing across my television screen as a young girl growing up in the last 15 years of the Cold War. Back then, Lenin and Stalin and Saddam Hussein and all those others who served up a way of life that countered American Capitalism and then had themselves enshrined in gigantic likenesses that eclipsed passers-by were the devils incarnate. The American news media splashed their countenances all over the television and made them terrifying in their rhetoric, as well as anathema to every principle enshrined in America… and by default, me.

There, in the declining sun of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the overgrown garden of the vastly underfunded Bulgarian National Gallery’s “Museum of the Art from the Socialist Period,” the jumbo-sized concrete effigy of Lenin — in fact the three largest ones — seemed quaint, innocent, even funny. Of course, this was November 2024 — nearly 35 years past the fall of Communism — and Bulgaria, despite its massive low-slung cinder block tower apartments, has moved from a highly centralized, planned economy to an open, market-based, and high-income economy with a large focus on technology.

But the thoughts of my three weeks in America over the summer — the first in two years — swirled inside of me, as did all the rhetoric, the lies, the grandstanding and the excessive drama of the 2024 American Presidential Elction. I had just watched — from afar — a populist cult-of-personality get re-elected after trying to overthrow the government just four years earlier, befriend a rich and powerful technocrat, and give him, in addition to many other chaotic narcissists, key positions in the American government. Both have promised to rid the government of their political enemies, enact revenge in the U.S. Courts, purge immigrants and other unwanted by military force and enact Communist-era restrictions on certain population’s civil rights, including an appointee who believes that “journalism should be defunded” to run the Voice of America news network — one of the cornerstones of a free and fair press.

A sampling of statues in the Bulgarian National Gallery’s Museum of the Art from the Socialist Period, including (center) the country’s first Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov.

While staring at these sculptures in the garden and then continuing into the exhibit, which glorified and deified “workers” as the paragon citizen of the state, I also had the terrifying, yet conclusive thought that, indeed, either I was in the Twlight Zone or that Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign used Communist tactics to achieve label-less, undefinable end, except “I do the fuck what I want-ism.” Indeed, l felt as if America and the Soviet Union had switched places, and now I, in the former Communist, closely aligned Soviet state of Bulgaria, was visiting the free “safe land” while over there, in America, Communist-like tyrannical bogeymen were implementing measures used during the 1980s. The once oppressive post-Soviet Balkan country was indeed, more free than my “Land of the Free and the Brave” home. Would Donald Trump and Elon Musk soon erect gigantic marble and concrete likenesses to shadow the Capitol building and the White House and all the other paeans to America’s freedoms in the center of Washington, DC? It certainly was not outside the realm of imagination.

To certain Americans, this may seem far-fetched. But by taking three tenets of Trump’s platform and comparing it with the platform of the Soviets makes it simple to see that soon, instead of Ronald Reagan entreating East Germans to “tear down that wall,” the next German chancellor could be on the America/Mexico border in 15 years telling them to remove theirs.

A sampling of paintings illustrating the building of the Bulgarian railways from a Communist artist, stamped by the party.

Make America Great Again (MAGA) = the Workers Movement of the 1920s

In the U.S., the word ‘Communist’ is such an insult, it evokes movies of McCarthy trials of the 1950s, in which those who identified with the ideology, lost their careers, their homes, their families, everything. Even being labeled a socialist is a no-go for plenty of Democrats. However, neither socialism nor communism is Mein Kampf sort of rhetoric. They are just theories put in place by men who either have good designs for their countries, or the goal of attaining absolute power and hiding behind a text book. Socialism is, in fact, a very broad and diffuse set of ideologies rooted in the post-Industrial-Revolution economic inequality, worker disempowerment and the consolidation of political and economic power in a capital-ownership class. Socialists still run Europe.

Communism, on the other hand, is an ideology based on the sociologist ideas Engels and Marx outlined in the Red Lion pub but taken a bit further. Communists want to address income inequality and social ills throughh the state, typically advocating for abolition of private property, the establishment of a dictatorship run by a worker party vanguard, and a global hegemony “prior to a distant phase of history when the state will wither away.” Communists consider themselves socialists — socialists with an ideology based around the common worker as hero— but Communist leaders and parties believe that to achieve change, violence is necessary. That has been a gradual evolution, however. Marx and Engels would hardly recognize the application of their ideals today. Most “socialists” want public regulation, rather than outright public ownership and are comfortable with national pride, although not belligerant nationalism.

A sampling of Bulgarian worker party art in which the worker is “the on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section… of every country, that section which pushes forward all others”

The sworn enemy of Trump’s MAGA movement is Communism, but MAGA demographically looks, feels, smells and acts like the Communist Workers Party movement of the early 20th Century. Nearly half of MAGA adherents earn about $50,000 a year, are considered middle- to low-income by many standards generally, are not university educated (only one-third have a college degree). They are a people who feel like they’re losing their country and their identity — displaced by communities of color, by feminists and by immigrants — and motivated by what they see as an existential threat to their way of life.

The workers' movement in the early 20th century was an equal response to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. The workers party — straight from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto — “are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section… of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” Compare this to the MAGA manifesto: “The American People have proven time and again that we can overcome any obstacle and any force pitted against us… But now we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE. Our future, our identity, and our very way of life are under threat like never before. Today we must once again call upon the same American Spirit that led us to prevail through every challenge of the past if we are going to lead our Nation to a brighter future.”

Various statues of Lenin located in the Bulgaria’s Communist art museum. Probably ten times this number were removed from public places and government buildings across the Soviet-aligned country.

Trump = Lenin, Stalin, and Dmitrov

In 1908, the Kingdom of Bulgaria was declared as a constitutional, hereditary monarchy and parliamentary democracy with a multi-party system and the Orthodox faith as the state religion. But post-war Bulgaria suffered from political instability and corruption. And in the mid-1930s a coup d’état brought Tsar Boris III into power. As a response to the proletariat discord, he curtailed Democratic freedoms and implemented an authoritarian regime — a recall of the old feudal way of doing things. Enter Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) and the Bolsheviks, spreading the ideas of a ruling socialist intelligentsia, the end of social classes and the equal treatment of all people —but espeically the beautification of workers — as the national religion.

But Lenin, the messenger, was a cult of personality not to be denied. “The (Soviet) dictatorship means — take note of this once and for all — unrestrained power and the use of force, not of law,” he wrote in his early political career. Although brought up in a middle class family — the son of a teacher and a doctor — Lenin witnessed the feudalism and poverty of the Russian monarchy, and when his older brother, Alexander, was executed by the monarchy for fighting the system, Lenin got the Communist bee in his bonnet. Like Trump, Lenin often nicknamed his political opponents after minor nuisances or antagonists in his favourite books. Like Trump, he wasn’t especially charasmatic and didn’t care about entertaining as much as he liked lively people and mistrusted bores who only spoke of radical plans. “Vladimir Ilyich was perhaps the most unemotional man I have ever met in politics. No hate, no compassion… His ruthlessness in argument never stemmed from a personal grudge — each word, even each slanderous innuendo in his writings, was coldly calculating,” according to the book Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror. Another said of his leader: “Lenin kept everyone at arm’s length. I never saw him put his hand on anyone’s shoulder and nobody among his comrades would have dared, however deferentially, to do so to him.”

Of Trump, the Atlantic wrote: “More than even Ronald Reagan, Trump seems supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting. He moves through life like a man who knows he is always being observed. If all human beings are, by their very nature, social actors, then Donald Trump seems to be more so — superhuman, in this one primal sense.”

One of the last vestigaes of Communism still standing in a Bulgarian park.

Eliminating Enemies, Controlling the Message

When riots broke out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on March 8, 1917, Tsar Nicholas sent troops to restore order. But by then, the government had resigned, and the Duma, supported by the army, called on the emperor to abdicate. A week later, Nicholas renounced the throne. A Provisional government was formed with the blessing of the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers’ deputies elected in the factories of the capital. Nicholas and his family were detained, and although exile to England was considered, sent to Siberia then Yekaterinburg, where they were slaughtered on July 17, 2017.

Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks thought that he was temporarily disoriented by the complexity of the situation in April 2017 when he came to Petrograd; moderate Socialists thought him mad. He went underground, but his MO remained the same: to smash the existing state machinery and introduce a “dictatorship of the proletariat”; that is, direct rule by the armed workers and peasants which would eventually “wither away” into a non-coercive, classless, stateless, Communist society. To Lenin, the Provisional Government was merely a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” that kept Russia in imperialist World War I. In hiding until November 7, 1917, Lenin emerged when the Bolesheviks elected him chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (the new Soviet Government) and vaulted him from his hideout to head of the revolutionary government of the largest country in the world practically overnight. His first act was to sign a peace treaty (The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) with Germany, allowing the struggling state to divert its troops to the Western Front and effectively end Russia’s involvement in the costly war. His second: to repudiate all repayments of all foreign loans obtained by the tsarist and Provisional governments and nationalized foreign properties in Russia without compensation. Four years later, Lenin had crushed all opposition parties, including the Mensheviks — supporters of a broad party government — and put opposition leaders through “show” trials with frequent exile to Siberia or death.

When President Donald Trump steps into the Oval Office on his first day, he has said his first act would be to deploy the Army to round up and detain immigrants. After that, Trump has vowed to empower the military to fight “the enemy from within” — his political foes and prominent Democrats. He has already nominated his Project 2025-aligned right-wing loyalists to serve in top roles overseeing the federal budget, trade, the State Department and the Defense Department, as well as nullified all the actions of the U.S. Justice Department against him; the cases of those involved in the attempted 2021 overthrow of the U.S. government are next. Top aides in the transitional government have said the president plans a blizzard of more than 25 executive orders and directives on Day 1, including stripping federal funds from schools teaching critical race theory, remove some anti-discrimination protections, withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and end the war in Ukraine.

Leaving Bulgaria

After walking away from the yard of Lenin statues and considering all the lives lost in wars, uprisings and simple disagreement with the Soviet hero who paved the way for the dictatorship of Josef Stalin, in which even more people perished, I was conflicted. It’s hard to dust off the remains of American capitalist-led idealism and anti-Communism sentiment from your shoulders after more than 40 years of it — even if the statues now seem ridiculous. Part of me wanted to throw stones at them; the other part wants to believe the people they represent were once idealistic young men changed and ultimately controlled by real politick. After considering the American circumstance, however, I concluded that I could not hold Lenin, Stalin, any of the Pan-Arabists, or even Ho Chi-Minh to a different standard than Trump because they rode to power on an idealism in which I believe. I had to see them just as I see him: men who will do anything to seize power and create a government in their image while crushing the institutions that actually benefit the people they purport to lead. And I wonder how anyone else can come to a different conclusion.