The article considers two areas of the most recent international historiographical debate: communism as a global historical phenomenon, marked from the beginning by transnational forms of organization and coordination; and the role of communism in the global history of the twentieth-century, from the first post-war period to the processes of decolonization, from the collapse of empires to the attempts to devise alternative models of modernization. Building on an updated bibliographic survey, the article considers how this set of interwoven problems has been approached, researched, and interpreted.