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	Harvard University Press Comrades! A History of World Communism By Robert Service Harvard University Press 624 Pages. $35

Shades of Red

An ambitious book by Robert Service pieces together the history of world communism - in all its forms.

By Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Published: June 1, 2007

Comrades came in many varieties: the quintessential revolutionary icon Che Guevara; the most famous 20th-century artist, Pablo Picasso; the Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot; and the now nonagenarian Spanish Civil War veteran from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Moe Fishman. The gentle Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin and the gray bureaucrat Konstantin Chernenko; the self-sacrificing activists in the Resistance during World War II and the self-aggrandizing functionaries of the ruling party elites of Eastern Europe; M.N. Roy of India and Agostinho Neto of Angola -- they all proudly identified themselves as communists. How to write a history of communism that can encompass their enormous range? How to avoid engaging in apologetics on the one hand and polemics on the other? Has communism been dead long enough to be treated by a historian dispassionately, if not objectively?

The task has not often been attempted. In 1975 three dons from St. Antony's College, Oxford, published their version. Communism was just reaching its zenith in terms of the number of countries ruled by parties claiming to adhere to the Marxist-Leninist principles of the one-party state, the one-ideology culture, a state-dominated economy and a mobilized society. Nearly 20 years later, not long after it had all come crashing down, Eric Hobsbawm (longtime professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and himself an erstwhile comrade) defined the global history of the "short 20th century" in terms of the rise and fall of Soviet communism. Now, we have Robert Service, another St. Antony's don, weighing in.

The author of biographies of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin as well as general histories of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, Service takes a no-nonsense approach in "Comrades! A History of World Communism." His prose is crisp. One short, declarative sentence follows another. Sometimes, nuance is sacrificed. Some statements border on caricature. Some -- such as that Salvador Allende's government was "communist-led," that Herbert Marcuse was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, or that Bill Clinton became president in 1994 -- are simply wrong. But there are many acute observations too: The Bolsheviks "were Jacobins with the telephone and the machine-gun." They became obsessed with inventing ways of investigating and controlling the state machinery because it was not theirs. The purges of the 1930s robbed the communist parties of their fittest individuals and thus were "a process of inverted Darwinism." The slaughter of Indonesian communists under General Suharto represented the "most comprehensive attack on communists since Stalin had assaulted his own party in 1937-8." And so on.

Robert Service / Harvard University Press Communism took on many shapes. Harry Pollitt woos British voters by stressing his readiness to be jailed for his beliefs.

"Comrades!" is fairly harsh on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founding fathers whose ideas "contained seeds of oppression and exploitation" by the regimes that would laud them. Lenin too gets stern treatment, as indeed do all communist leaders with the partial exceptions of Wladyslaw Gomulka and Fidel Castro. Other than Stalin (a "bad man" with a "gross personality disorder") and Mao (a "political thug"), the greatest vituperation is reserved for Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty and other apologists for Stalinist repression. Unnamed "revisionist" scholars of the late 1970s and 1980s are castigated (unfairly) for the same sin. Working with a lot of memoir material -- both published and deposited at Stanford University's Hoover Institution -- Service extracts nuggets about the personal lives of leading communists. Arresting as these are, they tend to distract attention from the book's main argument.

This is that the universal failure of ruling communist parties to sustain whatever initial popularity they may have enjoyed was due to their assumption of a tutelary role based on their claim to know what was best for "the masses." Military, financial and other kinds of dependence on Moscow both resulted from and perpetuated the congenital unpopularity of East European ruling parties. More generally, political insecurity and contempt for democratic procedures produced elections marked by force and fraud, labor camps and elite comrades feeding at the trough. It is not clear which Service considers worse -- rule by true believers or opportunists. In the history of world communism there were plenty of both kinds. Marxism is likened to religion or presented as its political substitute. It attracted intellectuals whose medieval predecessors "argued about how many angels could stand on the point of a needle." Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International before 1914, "set himself up as the Pope." Soviet communists "quoted excerpts from Marx, Engels and Lenin after the fashion of religious people with their sacred texts." The other analogy that "Comrades!" employs is signaled by the titles of its six parts: "Experiment," "Reproduction," "Mutation" and so on. The allusion is to a virus capable of "infecting" other movements, including those of the Far Right.

Robert Service / Harvard University Press Stalin and Mao look on as Chinese citizens receive Soviet training.

Service takes a more benign view of "independently minded" comrades and parties willing to compromise for the benefit of their constituents. His treatment of certain rank-and-file British communists, based on material in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, is particularly sympathetic. Likewise, the Italian comrades running the Bologna municipal administration and the communists of Kerala and West Bengal are admired for their pragmatism and electoral success. This is all well and good, but what goes unmentioned is that the extremism of the Bolsheviks, the Chinese communists, and, for that matter, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge grew out of extremity: the seeming endlessness of World War I, the brutalities of Japanese occupation and carpet bombing courtesy of the United States. The rise of communism as distinct from other socialist movements is inexplicable without taking due account of such extreme situations. Not only poverty and social inequality but the genuine crisis of global capitalism and the rise of fascism in the 1930s sustained belief in the promise of a better world under communism. One did not have to be a "fool for Stalin" to become a comrade or a supporter of the Soviet Union when the Nazis were at Stalingrad. After the war, it was a different story. As Service points out, Western Europe was "too successful in its economic, social and political regeneration" to give communist parties an opportunity for electoral success.

Toward the end, Service notes, "Communism as it really existed became bewilderingly diverse." This diversity becomes increasingly difficult for the book to handle: Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia and the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 is followed by the rise and fall of Allende in Chile; a capsule biography of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika comes two chapters after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe; the Sandinistas are first discussed later still. But these are quibbles. On the whole, the book succeeds in explaining what all the fuss was about, something that a whole generation that has grown up in the aftermath of communism's collapse needs to know.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is a professor of history at Michigan State University and the author of the forthcoming book "Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile."

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