COMRADES: Communism: A World History by Robert Service

Macmillan £25 pp589

Robert Service has already written imposing historical studies of Lenin and Stalin and, the last time I saw him on a BBC talk show, was apparently engaged on a portrait of Leon Trotsky. If completed, this trilogy would mean that he had outdone Isaac Deutscher, the only man ever to come close to the “triple crown” in Bolshevik biography (his Lenin having been unfinished at the time of death). It’s not altogether clear, therefore, why Service should have side-stepped in order to produce a large book that attempts to capture the whole arc of communist history from start to finish. Perhaps it is out of a sense of astonishment that the ideas of the three men above-named were ever able to draw millions into politics and place a huge portion of the globe under communist rule. Or a sense of astonishment that it was all over so suddenly. Or possibly it is part of a more consistent stock-taking — this is after all presented as “a world history” — whereby the ancestry of globalisation can be traced in the words and deeds of those who respected no frontiers and who once proudly proclaimed that the workers had no country.

Of course, the first defeat experienced by communism was its “nationalisation”, to pick an ironic word, or the sheer fact of its coming to power in isolated and backward states. Starting with Marx and borrowing from liberal historians such as JA Hobson (this development annoyingly unmentioned by Service), the Leninists were among the first to see that the world had now become interdependent. “Imperialism” meant that there would be war between the rival capitalist states, and that this war would spell the end of their rule and the succession to power of the working class. If I might put it dialectically (to coin a phrase), the world-wide calamity of 1914 both vindicated and vitiated this revolutionary prescience. The first world war dealt the old order a blow from which it has never recovered, but it also discredited Marx’s milder followers in the old Socialist International who mostly made the fatal decision to enlist under the banners of their own competing kings. When the resulting rubble was being sifted, quite small groups of communists had seized power in quite serious countries but the even more precious conquest — of the idea of a real revolutionary future — had passed into the hands of Leninist movements and intellectuals. The concept of communism as being somehow on the right side of history was not to become entirely risible until about 1968, and in some parts of the world not even then.

Service tries to tell the whole amazing story under a series of generalised headings such as Experiment and Mutation, and he has at his disposal a vast arsenal of details and anecdotes, but he is more or less confined to illustrating these tendencies on a country-by-country basis. He must have known from the start that this could mean a study that was many miles wide but perhaps only a few inches deep. His account of the 1914 crisis — the fulcrum event in the entire tale — is very hasty. I am as interested as the next person to know that Albania’s mini-Stalin Enver Hoxha was fixated on the films of Norman Wisdom, and the short account he gives of the invasion of Czechoslovakia manages to be quite masterly, but the compressed way in which he relates the origins of the Vietnam war is so scanty as to be positively misleading. Thus this is a book that slightly lends itself to the same cherry-picking in the reader as it did in the author. There are some confidence-shaking mistakes: the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was not a Sicilian. Communism was not “installed in Chile in the early 1970s”: instead a Socialist-led coalition was elected in 1970.

Service has interests in matters not ideological, which enrich the pages, and he writes with fluency and ease. I very much enjoyed his excursions into the works of Baroness Orczy and of Richmal Crompton, whose William books contained several pithy reflections on communism. He has a sense of historical irony, pointing out in a jolting phrase that the antired pogroms in Indonesia in 1965 were “the most comprehensive attack on communists since Stalin had assaulted his own party in 1937-8”. He also understands that, unlike the fascist powers, the communist bureaucrats had relatively few illusions about themselves. In particular, the Kremlin knew perfectly well that its rule in eastern Europe was highly unstable and unpopular, and that its regional proxies were little more than puppets. This helps to explain why, when a “reformer” such as Gorbachev eventually did emerge, his chief realisation had to be that large parts of the system were essentially beyond reform.

The most disappointing omission is that of any treatment of Marxist dissent. Some of the most noteworthy intellectuals of the 20th century emerged as “Left Opposition” enemies of orthodox Stalinism, but we get not even a mention of Victor Serge (who probably coined the word “totalitarian”) or CLR James, and the discussion of Trotsky and Rosa Luxembourg, and of their original disagreements with Lenin and Stalin, is vestigial. George Orwell is mentioned more than once, but to my astonishment Service gives a capsule account of his now-famous “list” of fellow travellers that is as plain wrong as any summary could be.

The loaded word “totalitarian” is probably the key one here. Marxism succeeded not because of oppressive economic conditions but because it offered a theory of history that purported to explain everything, and to provide solutions for problems of the human psyche as well as for questions of genetics and agriculture. This totalising tendency resulted in systems that tried to manage every aspect of the private life as well as of the political one. The repression of the human personality had its inevitable outcome in the quasi-religious cult of mediocre and resentful individuals. My other disagreements notwithstanding, I agree with the closing chapter in which Service soberly points out that this temptation to absolutism is still — mutated into different forms and faiths — very much with us.

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