Communism’s New Believers Have Forgotten Its Old Crimes
Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible?
- ▪Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back.
- ▪Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists.
- ▪Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible?
The Free Press files mainly under politics. We currently carry 170 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Free Press |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thefp.com/p/things-worth-remembering-gary-saul-morson |
| Publication time | Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:01:49 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-24T19:14:21.580Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-24T19:14:21.580Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | LTpg5UG_0d9g |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Communism’s New Believers Have Forgotten Its Old CrimesGary Saul Morson writes about the Cold War classic that explained communism’s seductive pull on intellectuals, and why its warnings matter again now. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)A forgotten Cold War masterpiece reveals why intelligent people once embraced a murderous ideology—and why its appeal has not disappeared.By Gary Saul Morson07.24.26 — Things Worth Remembering--:----:--Upgrade to ListenProduced by ElevenLabs using AI narration1READ IN APPREAD IN APPWelcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Free Press.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Free Press
