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Comrades: A World History of Communism
From Marx to Mao, from Engels to Allende, from Lenin and Stalin to Ceaucescu and Castro, "Comrades" tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on material from many national collections and several major languages and is the most up-to-date account produced since the 1960s. Ranging across not only the high politics and ideology of the most prominent communist regimes but also daily life under communism, culture and propaganda, Service analyses communism's appeal abroad as well as local attempts to set up communist administrations. He ends by showing that there was more to communism than mere brutality and demonstrates that while communism in its primordial form is now dead in most countries, the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people have not vanished: economic poverty and political oppression. And the lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form. It is a highly readable, compellingly argued and an exciting work of history, if not always a comforting one.
571 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
67 people are currently reading
1138 people want to read
About the author
Robert Service
42 books268 followersThis author is the British historian of modern Russia. For the British-Canadian writer of Yukon poetry, see Robert W. Service.
Robert Service is a British academic and historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, A History of Twentieth - Century Russia, Russia: Experiment with a People and Stalin: A Biography, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled Comrades Communism A World History (International Bestseller). He is married with four children.
Robert Service is a British academic and historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, A History of Twentieth - Century Russia, Russia: Experiment with a People and Stalin: A Biography, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled Comrades Communism A World History (International Bestseller). He is married with four children.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
May 26, 2019
The rise and fall of Communism is obviously a very fascinating subject, full of drama, pity, horror and the intensest of hopes - what could be more horrible than to see the fiery optimism of the young comrades of the 1920s and 30s fed into the gory charnelhouses of Uncle Joe, Mao and the rest of those old man vampires? But Robert Service in this fat book drains all the drama out like an embalmer replacing blood with formaldehyde. He is such a terrible terrible writer. I give you two examples chosen at random. On p301 we have this
The state publishing houses displayed their patriotic and cultural commitment by printing millions of copies of approved national classics. This was a high priority throughout Eastern Europe.
YOU DON'T SAY! Blimey, who would have thought it. And on p 476 he is STILL coming up with pearlers like this
The absence of constitutional and judicial propriety forestalled the preventability of administrative abuse.
HUH??? Bugger off, you boring old fart! This horrible book needed to be half as long and by someone who can actually write. That's right, it needed to be some other book entirely. It's so very tedious. I kept thinking oh well, I don't know much about the Cultural Revolution, so that should be interesting - wrong. There's no subject Robert service can't render into debilitatingly monochrome xeroxed bone-weary language. It stole a lot of my brain cells and wilted my enthusiasm for reading history. I should sue but I have no energy left.
********
SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT COMMUNISM
The dream which became the nightmare from which so many of us have been trying to wake up all our lives, the grim chainrattling spectre which haunts all attempts to ameliorate the sufferings of the poor... "what are you, some kind of communist?!" Ah, Lenin, why did you not live just a few years more, maybe a few months, maybe a few hours would have done it - then you would have taken the surgeon's knife to Stalin like the malignant tumour that he was. Ah Stalin - did the utter failure of your schemes drive you mad or were you mad to begin with? Why did they all obey you? Why did they love you even as you shoved their families into a mass grave in Siberia? Ah Russia, with your long melancholy winters, why did you not revolt against your bitter revolution as it went so disastrously wrong, why did you let them drive you like sheep first here, then there?
As for Chairman Mao, it seems his children grew up smart - they have torn down the whole of the shop except for its front, it still says "Communists" on the front but when you go inside - shazam! Aston Martins! Skyscrapers! Roulette wheels! Gigantic sock making machines! And except for a very few - shall we say incidents - they have kept approximate peace amongst one third of the world's population for 50 years, no mean feat, and now they are about to take over the world, in one way or another.
And now, who can not find these words intensely moving, we who know what came after, all the death, all the war and the utter, utter failure :
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of the world, unite!
The state publishing houses displayed their patriotic and cultural commitment by printing millions of copies of approved national classics. This was a high priority throughout Eastern Europe.
YOU DON'T SAY! Blimey, who would have thought it. And on p 476 he is STILL coming up with pearlers like this
The absence of constitutional and judicial propriety forestalled the preventability of administrative abuse.
HUH??? Bugger off, you boring old fart! This horrible book needed to be half as long and by someone who can actually write. That's right, it needed to be some other book entirely. It's so very tedious. I kept thinking oh well, I don't know much about the Cultural Revolution, so that should be interesting - wrong. There's no subject Robert service can't render into debilitatingly monochrome xeroxed bone-weary language. It stole a lot of my brain cells and wilted my enthusiasm for reading history. I should sue but I have no energy left.
********
SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT COMMUNISM
The dream which became the nightmare from which so many of us have been trying to wake up all our lives, the grim chainrattling spectre which haunts all attempts to ameliorate the sufferings of the poor... "what are you, some kind of communist?!" Ah, Lenin, why did you not live just a few years more, maybe a few months, maybe a few hours would have done it - then you would have taken the surgeon's knife to Stalin like the malignant tumour that he was. Ah Stalin - did the utter failure of your schemes drive you mad or were you mad to begin with? Why did they all obey you? Why did they love you even as you shoved their families into a mass grave in Siberia? Ah Russia, with your long melancholy winters, why did you not revolt against your bitter revolution as it went so disastrously wrong, why did you let them drive you like sheep first here, then there?
As for Chairman Mao, it seems his children grew up smart - they have torn down the whole of the shop except for its front, it still says "Communists" on the front but when you go inside - shazam! Aston Martins! Skyscrapers! Roulette wheels! Gigantic sock making machines! And except for a very few - shall we say incidents - they have kept approximate peace amongst one third of the world's population for 50 years, no mean feat, and now they are about to take over the world, in one way or another.
And now, who can not find these words intensely moving, we who know what came after, all the death, all the war and the utter, utter failure :
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of the world, unite!
July 16, 2008
Pop history at its worst. The book full of non-sequiturs, absurd pop psycho-analysis, broad generalizations with no supporting citations and just plain ridiculous claims. The writing is also horrible. The last two sentences of the book read, "Communism has proved to have metastasising features. It will have a long afterlife even when the last communist state has disappeared." I suppose Service is now trying to pass for a fortune-teller in addition to a bad historian.
Read
July 26, 2011Very simplistic and despite the 500 some odd pages not much is being said. The Red Flag by Priestland is far better and although shorter is far more complex recognizing the diversity of thought that is communism. For Service, communism is nothing more than a totalitarian single entity. Even though his own narrative demonstrates conflict between differing groups and theories, he is amazingly simplistic and one point Stalin's mustache is offered as evidence of authoritarianism -- just bizarre
August 6, 2011
This is a sound one volume narrative history of communism, written from a fairly predictable liberal democratic perspective.
Marxism is philosophically unsound. Leninism was astute at the process of seizing power but unable to manage the possession of power.
The result was (and Robert Service is persuasive in this), inevitable brutality, oppression, bureaucratism and sclerosis with failure inbuilt into the system.
However, the book is, like the liberal democratic strategy for dealing with communism after the Second World War, largely a work of containment.
Like all liberals, Service is fair-minded – up to a point – but the narrative has its gaps. Those gaps ultimately diminish the value of the book as anything more than a rough-hewn historical narrative.
There is no depth of understanding here. Service pays lip service to the conditions from which Communism emerged but it is merely that – lip service.
A revolutionary vanguard emerges because all other methods failed to deal with abuses.
These latter may seem small-scale for comfortable middle class people when compared to the later horrors of communism but they were far from so to the vast mass of the population in underdeveloped societies.
It is easy to be moralistic on a full stomach.
Lenin’s exiles experienced the Tsarist brutalities that preceded and accompanied the terror tactics of the desperate and failed Narodniks with no change for the better in peasant or worker conditions.
The confused and often stupid tactics of Mao arose from a world in which their opponents included a Kuomintang that permitted perhaps a million peasants to be murdered when dams were deliberately broken.
This is not to justify but merely to observe, since communism’s success and failure must be seen as the last desperate throw of the dice by radical intellectuals.
They had (in their own eyes) to seize power against systems of exploitation under conditions where no one had been trained to exercise power once it was seized.
The blame for the excesses of communism lies in the ineluctable human condition - the real idiocy of communism is its theory of our species.
It also lies in the conduct of preceding elites that created an educated class that had no function as much as with the faults of the ideology itself.
Create an educated class and then fail to listen to it or to feed it with sinecures (a lesson the Communists learned to the point of sclerosis when in power).
Do this and you will inevitably create explosive frustration. Some of this elite will go on to become obsessive Lenins or Breiviks.
The West now is in a similar state - an underemployed graduate class promotes liberal internationalism on the back of the general taxation of everyone else just as the base for that largesse is collapsing.
Capitalists and property-owners have listened to progressive intellectuals, created an alliance of sorts, but this has merely ended up in costly failed foreign interventions to extend markets.
This is what is meant by the ‘trahison des clercs’. Now the money is running out.
It is the conservative populist right that may seem to have better answers than a Left which engaged in its own ‘trahison’ in complicity with a system that, as communists, it had once affected to despise.
At the time of its arrival, Communism was often the only answer left to mass exploitation within underdeveloped territories and to the phenomenon of imperial exploitation.
It is no accident that communism failed where workers were benefiting from exploitation of the wider world (in other words, where capital accumulation permitted mass participation in social democracy).
Communists have had a continuing problem in that their preferred progressive forces will always have more in common with exploiters of the vast mass of humanity.
Social democracy as a negotiated solution has thus worked for much of the period in which communism ruled as an alternative. It was a necessity for elites in facing off an alternative model.
Social liberals have been struggling ever since communism collapsed to preserve what had only existed because this enemy also existed.
When communism disappeared as a rival, elites started to claw back their power, a process that started in the crisis of the late-1970s.
The complicity of the centre-left with a weird combination of free markets and authoritarian liberalism has now left it with no resources with which to reclaim leadership in the current time of troubles.
This resistance gap is being filled with petit-bourgeois populisms like the Tea Party, violent anarchism, anomie, the black economy, libertarian hacktivism – anything but a discredited Marxism.
Communism certainly succeeded in acquiring power and then became increasingly brutal to the degree that ideologues had massively ignorant but desperate populations to deal with.
Desperation simply created urgent demands for short term results under external military pressures that could only be enforced through the most brutal means.
Despite Eagleton’s claims (elsewhere) that brutality is no necessary result of communist control, the evidence is demonstrably against him.
Pol Pot was a logical culmination of the constant outward flow to the margins of ‘empire’ of this ideology of desperation.
Communism was always strongest where it was anti-imperialist and weakest where it was imposed by its own perverted imperialism (as in Eastern Europe).
There is a lesson in this – Communism is always the last ditch ideological card for desperate poker players.
Marxism, of course, may transmute (as it has done in Europe) into a devious bureaucratic corporatism but this very subterfuge indicates that it still requires a serious breakdown to come out into the open.
Service occasionally mentions the benefits of communism in promoting egalitarian welfarism – if not always delivered in practice, always a definite intent.
This intent was held back by lack of resources because of Communism’s own intrinsic economic incompetence.
This, in turn, was based on its true weakness, its failure to comprehend ‘human nature’ in terms of the persistence of human desire for ‘things’, individualist rationality and lack of shared ‘belief’.
True believers are always a minority in any religion. Sclerosis, corruption and a police state were inevitable results.
The majority simply accept the nostrums while a further minority either work the system to their own benefit or insist on the value of some ‘better’ system.
Service is very persuasive that Communism was intrinsically unreformable despite the hopes of reform Communists because reformers are, in the end, not really electable as Communists.
What he does not do is delve very far into the psychology of Communist failure.
By not going deeper into this top-down intent to improve the lot of the general population without its actual consent, the phenomenon ultimately remains unexplained.
Pol Pot, Hoxha, Mengistu and Ceaucescu are the leaders that we are supposed to be horrified by. We are all supposed to be impressed by that rank example of political incompetence, Mikhail Gorbachev.
But this is absurd. Even Service falls for a moment into the ‘good’ Communist trap. Gorbachev brought down communism as an idealist communist.
This is not an example of goodness or nobility but merely of stupidity. The same might be said of Dubcek. Only Havel saw things clearly.
We are certainly right to be horrified by the Pol Pots but we should equally be stunned that ‘democratic centralism’ should turn up such a light weight and dreamer as Gorbachev.
If a system can only produce thugs, sclerotics and dreamers, then it is patently not working.Communism fails fundamentally as a political ideology because it simply is incapable of managing complex societies.
Democratic centralism is flawed because bureaucracies and revolutionary struggles thrust inadequates into power by the nature of the process.
Nevertheless, liberal democrats are not wise to strut over the ‘end of history’ or the inevitability of free markets and liberal institutionalism.
The anti-Communists have operated as vilely as the Communists on many occasions but with much less excuse except defensive greed.
If the West had stood back and permitted the Revolution of 1917 space in return for a policy of non-interference elsewhere, then Bukharinism might have created a social-fascist state.
Such a state need not have been a threat or quite so murderous. But that is a big argument and we shall never know.
The Oslo bombing indicates that resentment exists against the self-satisfaction of progressive liberalism. Self-serving elites govern on behalf of the people in name but for themselves in practice.
When all the customary expressions of horror have passed, it behoves to ask what the conditions are that trigger such actions. It is not enough to simply refer to such ‘extremists’ as mad or evil.
The history of democratic centralism (communism) may yet offer us some lessons on dealing with this sort of ‘ressentiment’ and this is a recommended basic text in that process.
Something will always emerge that may offer cause to the propertied to be fearful whenever a new generation of radical intellectuals see the state of the exploited and oppressed, culturally and economically.
If there are not enough jobs for high school graduates and if they can create cadres capable of sufficient organisational competence, liberal democracy and capitalism have a problem.
This book is valuable, therefore, for two entirely different reasons. It is a well argued case study about a movement of resistance that collapsed under the weight of its own ‘internal contradictions'.
It is also valuable for what it fails to talk about – for the gaps in the narrative. What is now needed is to supplement this narrative with a look at those gaps.
This means the conditions that permitted communism to emerge and the precise effect of the fear and loathing of imperial elites (internal and external and not forgetting the US) on its trajectory.
We should also be honest about the short term positive changes communism effected through often brutal means for majorities against minorities.
And about those internal contradictions and inherent flaws we have referred to (on which Service tells us most but not all of the story).
From there we can start to consider what, to be fair, Service, does address though almost in passing – could ‘communism’ arise again?
The answer is probably ‘yes’ but not in that name, nor in that particular Marxist-Leninist form nor in any way that is recognisably communist as we now understand the term.
In the end, Communism was just Nietzsche’s priestly Christianity but with bureaucratic and military teeth, a religion for the masses. But it did give some voice to the weakest.
Instead of operating alongside the State, it became the State. For priests read apparatchiks and bureaucrats.
As with Christianity, the weak were represented but their interests perverted by special interests - and yet they did get some benefits.
The refusal to accept this 'good' in communism is to be blind to the possibility of its return as some form of authoritarian national welfarism that might easily have a rightist cultural cloak.
While the Soviet Union collapsed surprisingly quickly under the weight of its own contradictions, we now seem to be blind to the potential for collapse in our remaining two large imperial systems.
We now get the cultural panic without the analysis or the remedial action.
The Chinese are now wholly dependent for growth on grabbing overseas resources with all the verve of British imperial pirates, while the US represents a financial system with crumbling machinery.
That debt-ridden machinery depends for its short term survival on Chinese desperation to keep it and European capitalism in operation.
We are back in an age of unstable competing empires and of terrorism, exactly where we were in the late nineteenth century.
Marx loved irony – that the whole capitalist thing is being held together by an exploitative communist peasant state will have him grimly smiling in his grave.
Perhaps the local revolutionary struggles of the Zapatistas on the ground, of Anonymous in the ether and of national and religious fundamentalists give us clues to the future.
Today, only one of these trends owes anything to Marxism – and then only indirectly. One might come to say one day, without irony: “Communism is dead. Long live revolutionary national welfarism.”
Marxism is philosophically unsound. Leninism was astute at the process of seizing power but unable to manage the possession of power.
The result was (and Robert Service is persuasive in this), inevitable brutality, oppression, bureaucratism and sclerosis with failure inbuilt into the system.
However, the book is, like the liberal democratic strategy for dealing with communism after the Second World War, largely a work of containment.
Like all liberals, Service is fair-minded – up to a point – but the narrative has its gaps. Those gaps ultimately diminish the value of the book as anything more than a rough-hewn historical narrative.
There is no depth of understanding here. Service pays lip service to the conditions from which Communism emerged but it is merely that – lip service.
A revolutionary vanguard emerges because all other methods failed to deal with abuses.
These latter may seem small-scale for comfortable middle class people when compared to the later horrors of communism but they were far from so to the vast mass of the population in underdeveloped societies.
It is easy to be moralistic on a full stomach.
Lenin’s exiles experienced the Tsarist brutalities that preceded and accompanied the terror tactics of the desperate and failed Narodniks with no change for the better in peasant or worker conditions.
The confused and often stupid tactics of Mao arose from a world in which their opponents included a Kuomintang that permitted perhaps a million peasants to be murdered when dams were deliberately broken.
This is not to justify but merely to observe, since communism’s success and failure must be seen as the last desperate throw of the dice by radical intellectuals.
They had (in their own eyes) to seize power against systems of exploitation under conditions where no one had been trained to exercise power once it was seized.
The blame for the excesses of communism lies in the ineluctable human condition - the real idiocy of communism is its theory of our species.
It also lies in the conduct of preceding elites that created an educated class that had no function as much as with the faults of the ideology itself.
Create an educated class and then fail to listen to it or to feed it with sinecures (a lesson the Communists learned to the point of sclerosis when in power).
Do this and you will inevitably create explosive frustration. Some of this elite will go on to become obsessive Lenins or Breiviks.
The West now is in a similar state - an underemployed graduate class promotes liberal internationalism on the back of the general taxation of everyone else just as the base for that largesse is collapsing.
Capitalists and property-owners have listened to progressive intellectuals, created an alliance of sorts, but this has merely ended up in costly failed foreign interventions to extend markets.
This is what is meant by the ‘trahison des clercs’. Now the money is running out.
It is the conservative populist right that may seem to have better answers than a Left which engaged in its own ‘trahison’ in complicity with a system that, as communists, it had once affected to despise.
At the time of its arrival, Communism was often the only answer left to mass exploitation within underdeveloped territories and to the phenomenon of imperial exploitation.
It is no accident that communism failed where workers were benefiting from exploitation of the wider world (in other words, where capital accumulation permitted mass participation in social democracy).
Communists have had a continuing problem in that their preferred progressive forces will always have more in common with exploiters of the vast mass of humanity.
Social democracy as a negotiated solution has thus worked for much of the period in which communism ruled as an alternative. It was a necessity for elites in facing off an alternative model.
Social liberals have been struggling ever since communism collapsed to preserve what had only existed because this enemy also existed.
When communism disappeared as a rival, elites started to claw back their power, a process that started in the crisis of the late-1970s.
The complicity of the centre-left with a weird combination of free markets and authoritarian liberalism has now left it with no resources with which to reclaim leadership in the current time of troubles.
This resistance gap is being filled with petit-bourgeois populisms like the Tea Party, violent anarchism, anomie, the black economy, libertarian hacktivism – anything but a discredited Marxism.
Communism certainly succeeded in acquiring power and then became increasingly brutal to the degree that ideologues had massively ignorant but desperate populations to deal with.
Desperation simply created urgent demands for short term results under external military pressures that could only be enforced through the most brutal means.
Despite Eagleton’s claims (elsewhere) that brutality is no necessary result of communist control, the evidence is demonstrably against him.
Pol Pot was a logical culmination of the constant outward flow to the margins of ‘empire’ of this ideology of desperation.
Communism was always strongest where it was anti-imperialist and weakest where it was imposed by its own perverted imperialism (as in Eastern Europe).
There is a lesson in this – Communism is always the last ditch ideological card for desperate poker players.
Marxism, of course, may transmute (as it has done in Europe) into a devious bureaucratic corporatism but this very subterfuge indicates that it still requires a serious breakdown to come out into the open.
Service occasionally mentions the benefits of communism in promoting egalitarian welfarism – if not always delivered in practice, always a definite intent.
This intent was held back by lack of resources because of Communism’s own intrinsic economic incompetence.
This, in turn, was based on its true weakness, its failure to comprehend ‘human nature’ in terms of the persistence of human desire for ‘things’, individualist rationality and lack of shared ‘belief’.
True believers are always a minority in any religion. Sclerosis, corruption and a police state were inevitable results.
The majority simply accept the nostrums while a further minority either work the system to their own benefit or insist on the value of some ‘better’ system.
Service is very persuasive that Communism was intrinsically unreformable despite the hopes of reform Communists because reformers are, in the end, not really electable as Communists.
What he does not do is delve very far into the psychology of Communist failure.
By not going deeper into this top-down intent to improve the lot of the general population without its actual consent, the phenomenon ultimately remains unexplained.
Pol Pot, Hoxha, Mengistu and Ceaucescu are the leaders that we are supposed to be horrified by. We are all supposed to be impressed by that rank example of political incompetence, Mikhail Gorbachev.
But this is absurd. Even Service falls for a moment into the ‘good’ Communist trap. Gorbachev brought down communism as an idealist communist.
This is not an example of goodness or nobility but merely of stupidity. The same might be said of Dubcek. Only Havel saw things clearly.
We are certainly right to be horrified by the Pol Pots but we should equally be stunned that ‘democratic centralism’ should turn up such a light weight and dreamer as Gorbachev.
If a system can only produce thugs, sclerotics and dreamers, then it is patently not working.Communism fails fundamentally as a political ideology because it simply is incapable of managing complex societies.
Democratic centralism is flawed because bureaucracies and revolutionary struggles thrust inadequates into power by the nature of the process.
Nevertheless, liberal democrats are not wise to strut over the ‘end of history’ or the inevitability of free markets and liberal institutionalism.
The anti-Communists have operated as vilely as the Communists on many occasions but with much less excuse except defensive greed.
If the West had stood back and permitted the Revolution of 1917 space in return for a policy of non-interference elsewhere, then Bukharinism might have created a social-fascist state.
Such a state need not have been a threat or quite so murderous. But that is a big argument and we shall never know.
The Oslo bombing indicates that resentment exists against the self-satisfaction of progressive liberalism. Self-serving elites govern on behalf of the people in name but for themselves in practice.
When all the customary expressions of horror have passed, it behoves to ask what the conditions are that trigger such actions. It is not enough to simply refer to such ‘extremists’ as mad or evil.
The history of democratic centralism (communism) may yet offer us some lessons on dealing with this sort of ‘ressentiment’ and this is a recommended basic text in that process.
Something will always emerge that may offer cause to the propertied to be fearful whenever a new generation of radical intellectuals see the state of the exploited and oppressed, culturally and economically.
If there are not enough jobs for high school graduates and if they can create cadres capable of sufficient organisational competence, liberal democracy and capitalism have a problem.
This book is valuable, therefore, for two entirely different reasons. It is a well argued case study about a movement of resistance that collapsed under the weight of its own ‘internal contradictions'.
It is also valuable for what it fails to talk about – for the gaps in the narrative. What is now needed is to supplement this narrative with a look at those gaps.
This means the conditions that permitted communism to emerge and the precise effect of the fear and loathing of imperial elites (internal and external and not forgetting the US) on its trajectory.
We should also be honest about the short term positive changes communism effected through often brutal means for majorities against minorities.
And about those internal contradictions and inherent flaws we have referred to (on which Service tells us most but not all of the story).
From there we can start to consider what, to be fair, Service, does address though almost in passing – could ‘communism’ arise again?
The answer is probably ‘yes’ but not in that name, nor in that particular Marxist-Leninist form nor in any way that is recognisably communist as we now understand the term.
In the end, Communism was just Nietzsche’s priestly Christianity but with bureaucratic and military teeth, a religion for the masses. But it did give some voice to the weakest.
Instead of operating alongside the State, it became the State. For priests read apparatchiks and bureaucrats.
As with Christianity, the weak were represented but their interests perverted by special interests - and yet they did get some benefits.
The refusal to accept this 'good' in communism is to be blind to the possibility of its return as some form of authoritarian national welfarism that might easily have a rightist cultural cloak.
While the Soviet Union collapsed surprisingly quickly under the weight of its own contradictions, we now seem to be blind to the potential for collapse in our remaining two large imperial systems.
We now get the cultural panic without the analysis or the remedial action.
The Chinese are now wholly dependent for growth on grabbing overseas resources with all the verve of British imperial pirates, while the US represents a financial system with crumbling machinery.
That debt-ridden machinery depends for its short term survival on Chinese desperation to keep it and European capitalism in operation.
We are back in an age of unstable competing empires and of terrorism, exactly where we were in the late nineteenth century.
Marx loved irony – that the whole capitalist thing is being held together by an exploitative communist peasant state will have him grimly smiling in his grave.
Perhaps the local revolutionary struggles of the Zapatistas on the ground, of Anonymous in the ether and of national and religious fundamentalists give us clues to the future.
Today, only one of these trends owes anything to Marxism – and then only indirectly. One might come to say one day, without irony: “Communism is dead. Long live revolutionary national welfarism.”
February 11, 2009
Oh boy. I've never been so relieved to finish a book in my life. I don't have the energy to write what I want about this book, so just go read Paul's review because I agree 150%. Yeah, I'm not kidding. The whole 150%.
I've read lots about communism but I'm in no way an expert. Still, I'm skeptical about two of Mr. Service's views. First, he completely buys the whole "the US made Castro a communist" line, which is blatantly absurd, I'm sorry. Second, he gushes over Gorbachev like a sycophant, taking the admitted Marxist and lifetime Communist at his word with no reserve. Misha was just so wonderful! He decided all on his own against all odds to support freedom! What the crap is that? Sorry again. Not buying it. Service also manages to paint Reagan in such an unflattering and comic light that the Hollywood crowd would be sure to rave. That is, if they ever took two seconds to read anything remotely objective about the political theories of so many of their heroes. These two problems make me question the rest of Mr. Service's views on history. But honestly, my brain is so muddled by his writing and obscure, insignificant facts I don't know if I'll remember much of what he said anyway.
I've read lots about communism but I'm in no way an expert. Still, I'm skeptical about two of Mr. Service's views. First, he completely buys the whole "the US made Castro a communist" line, which is blatantly absurd, I'm sorry. Second, he gushes over Gorbachev like a sycophant, taking the admitted Marxist and lifetime Communist at his word with no reserve. Misha was just so wonderful! He decided all on his own against all odds to support freedom! What the crap is that? Sorry again. Not buying it. Service also manages to paint Reagan in such an unflattering and comic light that the Hollywood crowd would be sure to rave. That is, if they ever took two seconds to read anything remotely objective about the political theories of so many of their heroes. These two problems make me question the rest of Mr. Service's views on history. But honestly, my brain is so muddled by his writing and obscure, insignificant facts I don't know if I'll remember much of what he said anyway.
December 19, 2018
Pro tip: If you want to read a book about a topic you know little on, don't read books that are supposed to be a comprehensive history.
This book should have come with a warning saying that if you want to learn about the history of communism, you need to know about the history of communism.
Review Continued Here
This book should have come with a warning saying that if you want to learn about the history of communism, you need to know about the history of communism.
Review Continued Here
July 10, 2013
Robert Service has provided a decent, detailed, yet highly readable account of the world communist movement, that leaves no stone unturned.
Most of the book, especially the earlier part, is focused on the USSR, but there is decent insight into Yugoslavia, Cuba, and China. However, Comrades is not a simple chronology of the world communist movement, it is an account of the factors, the attitudes, and the evolving nature of communism, and why it ultimately failed.
Service begins with a theoretical analysis of pre-Marxist communist, followed with examination of Marx and Engels, the early communist movement, leading to the Russian Revolution. While it focuses on the policies, power struggles, and other key factors, it frequently backtracks to the attitudes, and fortunes of people in communist parties all around the world, particularly Great Britain, Italy, France and the USA.
The only criticism one can have with Comrades is that certain countries, perhaps some of the most severe, such as Albania and North Korea, could have done with some more insight, but with a book so decently constructed, one can hardly quibble.
Service reaches a conclusion, held by many, that Communism, as we knew in the Soviet or Maoist models, is highly unlikely to ever return in such a guise. However, the legacy of communism is strongly ingrained and is unlikely to ever disappear in the near future. Such a legacy is the burden on democratic development, authoritarian practices, and the continual nature of the Chinese state, which retains all the key characteristics of communist authoritarianism.
Robert Service decently accounts for the failure of communism, and with regard to the pivotal moment, Perestroika, he delivers a fairly positive portrait of Gorbachev, but concedes that ultimately Gorbachev held a romanticized view of a caring, humanitanitarian Lenin who ultimately never existed.
Most of the book, especially the earlier part, is focused on the USSR, but there is decent insight into Yugoslavia, Cuba, and China. However, Comrades is not a simple chronology of the world communist movement, it is an account of the factors, the attitudes, and the evolving nature of communism, and why it ultimately failed.
Service begins with a theoretical analysis of pre-Marxist communist, followed with examination of Marx and Engels, the early communist movement, leading to the Russian Revolution. While it focuses on the policies, power struggles, and other key factors, it frequently backtracks to the attitudes, and fortunes of people in communist parties all around the world, particularly Great Britain, Italy, France and the USA.
The only criticism one can have with Comrades is that certain countries, perhaps some of the most severe, such as Albania and North Korea, could have done with some more insight, but with a book so decently constructed, one can hardly quibble.
Service reaches a conclusion, held by many, that Communism, as we knew in the Soviet or Maoist models, is highly unlikely to ever return in such a guise. However, the legacy of communism is strongly ingrained and is unlikely to ever disappear in the near future. Such a legacy is the burden on democratic development, authoritarian practices, and the continual nature of the Chinese state, which retains all the key characteristics of communist authoritarianism.
Robert Service decently accounts for the failure of communism, and with regard to the pivotal moment, Perestroika, he delivers a fairly positive portrait of Gorbachev, but concedes that ultimately Gorbachev held a romanticized view of a caring, humanitanitarian Lenin who ultimately never existed.
February 8, 2008
I picked up the hardcover edition of Comrades by chance from a display at the local library. I haven't studied Communism in depth since college, so I thought this survey would be a good way to re-introduce myself to the subject from the top down.
I enjoyed the first few chapters on pre-Marx communism, but the writing style soon bogged me down. Service's account is too cursory and clumsy to really engage the reader. At times, I feel like I am reading a wikipedia entry - there is a decent amount of basic information, but no real in-depth analysis or commentary. Basically, I read the first few chapters and collected a list of topics I want to research in greater depth - Robespierre, Marat, Babeuf, Hegel, John Wycliffe, the Anabaptist Munster Rebellion, the Peasant's War, the Levellers, Proudhon, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc.
Now of course I understand that a comprehensive survey of world communism requires brevity and exclusion at times, but to invest the time to read 600+ pages, I need some instances of greater depth and insight into the personalities and dynamics at play. For example, Service's account of the October Revolution and the early day's of Lenin's rule provides a competent summary of who, what, when, and where, but fails to provide any feel for or deeper understanding of the drama of the time and the psychology of the individual actors. I am not getting a sufficient return on my time, and thus may not continue to read this book. (Although I may just skip forward to check out Service's account of non-Soviet communism.)
I enjoyed the first few chapters on pre-Marx communism, but the writing style soon bogged me down. Service's account is too cursory and clumsy to really engage the reader. At times, I feel like I am reading a wikipedia entry - there is a decent amount of basic information, but no real in-depth analysis or commentary. Basically, I read the first few chapters and collected a list of topics I want to research in greater depth - Robespierre, Marat, Babeuf, Hegel, John Wycliffe, the Anabaptist Munster Rebellion, the Peasant's War, the Levellers, Proudhon, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc.
Now of course I understand that a comprehensive survey of world communism requires brevity and exclusion at times, but to invest the time to read 600+ pages, I need some instances of greater depth and insight into the personalities and dynamics at play. For example, Service's account of the October Revolution and the early day's of Lenin's rule provides a competent summary of who, what, when, and where, but fails to provide any feel for or deeper understanding of the drama of the time and the psychology of the individual actors. I am not getting a sufficient return on my time, and thus may not continue to read this book. (Although I may just skip forward to check out Service's account of non-Soviet communism.)
July 28, 2018
tl;dr My negative rating is based off the rhetorical and methodological bent. I am not contesting any of the historical facts. For a more even-handed history of socialist/communist thought I suggest History of Socialism: A Comparative Survey Of Socialism, Communism, Trade Unionism, Cooperation, Utopianism, and Other Systems of Reform and Reconstruction or Communism, Fascism, and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations.
This book does have valuable information but it is not a history book. It is polemic. The rhetoric is blatant and compromising. I understand that all reportage is done through a subjective lens, but it goes so far as to criticize hygiene, sexual proclivities, and fashion sense. Examples of the bent are rampant so I'll just pick out a few examples: "Communism in western Europe - with Italy, France, Spain, and Greece as notable exceptions - held next to no appeal to the imagination of the individual working class in whose name it had been invented" (p. 389-390). Um....those "notable exceptions" make up a LARGE portion of western Europe! Another example: "Supposedly this was Mao's reaction to all the suffering: 'You have only tree leaves to eat? So be it'" (p. 332). This quote is taken from a book that had substantial critique ("Mao: The Unknown Story") for having unsubstantiated claims and since when is history written with "supposed" quotes? One last example of the rhetoric would be in its description of Angola. After briefly mentioning the funding by the US and South Africa of an anti-communist army against the nation, the author states: "It would be overstretching the word's meaning to say that communism was installed in Angola, despite the longevity of the regime of Neto and his successors" (p. 410). Yes, it would be. Nevertheless, you managed to state it.
These examples (which are indicative of the bulk of the book), although not properly wrong, force on the reader a political conclusion. On the few occasions that the author concedes comparable activities by liberal democracies these are always qualified - something never granted to the substantive system. Moreover, wherever there was a notable Westerner who was sympathetic to the cause, they were dismissed as was Sartre as a "hungry child" for propaganda and others like Camus are cited for having written against Stalinist totalitarianism without, however, mentioning that he was the founder of the Revolutionary Union Movement (likewise omissions could be cited for Orwell). I'm not here arguing against the crimes committed by communist dictators, but this book which purports to be a "history of world communism," only focuses on those aspects. It would be as if a history of WWII only focused on Dresden or one of Vietnam just on My Lai. (Which, by the way, 3 pages are given to describe the deprivations of Vietnamese citizens and the brutality of the Vietcong whereas less than half a sentence is given to "American...atrocities.")
Indeed, for someone who so raptly denounces the sectarian practices of the USSR he seems almost adulatory of Milosevic, whose war crimes and subsequent indictment by the Hague he maladroitly elides, by stating that Milosevic "with cunning" avoided the disturbances in Belgrade witnessed in Warsaw and Berlin, until the last twenty pages of the book to only circumspectly acknowledge (without ever using the word) the Bosnian genocide. Barely two pages are given to Chiapas and the Zapatistas within which time they are disregarded for NOT containing the totalitarian ethos, and although the publication of the book was only a couple years after his release, there is zero mention of Ocalan. It is only at page 480 (out of 482) that the author comes somewhere close to acknowledging that some of the problems addressed are seen in other forms of government (only comprising a single paragraph, however) and then only to close the book by insinuating that such tactics are a metastasized corpuscle of communist praxis. Again, I am not trying to argue against any of the negative aspects of communist totalitarianism presented in this book, but given the picture painted by the author it would appear that not a single person outside the top officials of state have ever supported communistic policies other than indoctrinated dupes. This is a blatant misrepresentation and only adds to the contentious dialogue around any other form of government that doesn’t merely puppet laissez-faire platitudes.
This book does have valuable information but it is not a history book. It is polemic. The rhetoric is blatant and compromising. I understand that all reportage is done through a subjective lens, but it goes so far as to criticize hygiene, sexual proclivities, and fashion sense. Examples of the bent are rampant so I'll just pick out a few examples: "Communism in western Europe - with Italy, France, Spain, and Greece as notable exceptions - held next to no appeal to the imagination of the individual working class in whose name it had been invented" (p. 389-390). Um....those "notable exceptions" make up a LARGE portion of western Europe! Another example: "Supposedly this was Mao's reaction to all the suffering: 'You have only tree leaves to eat? So be it'" (p. 332). This quote is taken from a book that had substantial critique ("Mao: The Unknown Story") for having unsubstantiated claims and since when is history written with "supposed" quotes? One last example of the rhetoric would be in its description of Angola. After briefly mentioning the funding by the US and South Africa of an anti-communist army against the nation, the author states: "It would be overstretching the word's meaning to say that communism was installed in Angola, despite the longevity of the regime of Neto and his successors" (p. 410). Yes, it would be. Nevertheless, you managed to state it.
These examples (which are indicative of the bulk of the book), although not properly wrong, force on the reader a political conclusion. On the few occasions that the author concedes comparable activities by liberal democracies these are always qualified - something never granted to the substantive system. Moreover, wherever there was a notable Westerner who was sympathetic to the cause, they were dismissed as was Sartre as a "hungry child" for propaganda and others like Camus are cited for having written against Stalinist totalitarianism without, however, mentioning that he was the founder of the Revolutionary Union Movement (likewise omissions could be cited for Orwell). I'm not here arguing against the crimes committed by communist dictators, but this book which purports to be a "history of world communism," only focuses on those aspects. It would be as if a history of WWII only focused on Dresden or one of Vietnam just on My Lai. (Which, by the way, 3 pages are given to describe the deprivations of Vietnamese citizens and the brutality of the Vietcong whereas less than half a sentence is given to "American...atrocities.")
Indeed, for someone who so raptly denounces the sectarian practices of the USSR he seems almost adulatory of Milosevic, whose war crimes and subsequent indictment by the Hague he maladroitly elides, by stating that Milosevic "with cunning" avoided the disturbances in Belgrade witnessed in Warsaw and Berlin, until the last twenty pages of the book to only circumspectly acknowledge (without ever using the word) the Bosnian genocide. Barely two pages are given to Chiapas and the Zapatistas within which time they are disregarded for NOT containing the totalitarian ethos, and although the publication of the book was only a couple years after his release, there is zero mention of Ocalan. It is only at page 480 (out of 482) that the author comes somewhere close to acknowledging that some of the problems addressed are seen in other forms of government (only comprising a single paragraph, however) and then only to close the book by insinuating that such tactics are a metastasized corpuscle of communist praxis. Again, I am not trying to argue against any of the negative aspects of communist totalitarianism presented in this book, but given the picture painted by the author it would appear that not a single person outside the top officials of state have ever supported communistic policies other than indoctrinated dupes. This is a blatant misrepresentation and only adds to the contentious dialogue around any other form of government that doesn’t merely puppet laissez-faire platitudes.
April 15, 2013
Wonderful storytelling, unfortunately, the grim history, criminal idealism or dark personalities of its characters made the story sad and shocking. But the storyteller did his homework. The story goes like this: we have a sick, mad world, let's make it worse by ruining the idea that we can make this world better. The history of world communism is told from its beginning to its end, simplified and attractive.
September 8, 2012
Interesting. I thought Service's biographies of Lenin and Stalin were very good, putting the personalities in the context of their times, as an academic approach should. 'Trotsky' showed a more piquant Service that never missed an opportunity to remind the reader of his subject's penchant for terror and oppression, but the book was still convincing. 'Comrades', however, reads more like Margaret Thatcher's memoir than academic history. Communism is a 'malaise', communists nothing but 'thugs' and 'unconscious authoritarians' (how weak is that?!). About 3/4 of the book is about the USSR, sensibly considering Service's specialisation, but also in line with his approach where communists everywhere were basically just Moscow dupes. Yes, the cruelty of all revolutionary regimes is a historical fact, but there is little to no effort at understanding the appeal of communism, even if it was never a majority appeal. That said, the book is still a decent attempt at world history if you can get beyond the cold war rhetoric (not surprisingly, at the end he wholly buys into the 'clash of cultures' scenario, where Islam is the new enemy of the West). I'm very much hoping David Priestland's 'Red Flag' will offer a more balanced historical reading.
June 12, 2020
This book gave me company for three weeks during the lockdown. The personalities, ideological contestations, follies and the triumphs of communism made for fascinating reading. Robert Service tells the story very lucidly. But he is not an admirer of communism.
The appeal of Communism lies in its combination of idealism with intellectualism. However, the pursuit of the classless society resulted in mass violence everywhere. Once established, communist regimes survived on repression and surveillance and denial of basic freedoms to their peoples. The standard of living of the people, in communist societies, never reached the level of western capitalist societies. In science and technology, the communist world was always in the catch-up mode. But for the abundant natural resources of the Soviet Union, the communist world would have collapsed long before it did.
The history of communism is a cautionary tale against the pursuit of Utopias.
The appeal of Communism lies in its combination of idealism with intellectualism. However, the pursuit of the classless society resulted in mass violence everywhere. Once established, communist regimes survived on repression and surveillance and denial of basic freedoms to their peoples. The standard of living of the people, in communist societies, never reached the level of western capitalist societies. In science and technology, the communist world was always in the catch-up mode. But for the abundant natural resources of the Soviet Union, the communist world would have collapsed long before it did.
The history of communism is a cautionary tale against the pursuit of Utopias.
August 27, 2014
Interesting topic. Poor writing. This pretty much sums up (for me) the book. Robert Service did a great investigation job (even if a little biased considering the source of most of the information). The discussion of the role of communism in the world is a cumbersome task considering the span of time it encompasses as well as the amount of countries involved. However, even with that in mind, the structure of the book and even of the chapters is rather confusing. The author is constantly jumping between time intervals and countries on the same chapter which makes the task of reading rather painful at some times.
As positive note, I believe this book can be a good introduction to the story of communism providing some overall insight on the matter.
As positive note, I believe this book can be a good introduction to the story of communism providing some overall insight on the matter.
May 25, 2012
A few weeks ago I re-read "This Godless Communism", a very cheesy Cold War-era American anti-Communist comic book. This caused me to want to read a scholarly book on Commmunism, and this is such a book, written by a well-known British historian of Russia. It does not have much that I didn't already know, but it organizes this common knowledge.
Communism, which is to say destroying the existing social order and replacing it with a new one based on human equality, is a very old idea, though the modern word only appeared in the 1840s. The founders of modern Communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A physicist will say that although Newton was a genius, he made mistakes; a Christian will not admit that Jesus made mistakes, and will find the question itself offensive. For a Communist, Marx is more like Jesus for a Christian than like Newton for a physicist. Marx wrote an analysis of capitalist political economy, Das Kapital. Eugen Böhm von Bawerk found flaws in it, and later so did Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes and many other economists. Historians and sociologists also found flaws with Marx's and Engels's analysis of society. As Service puts it, "Practically every sector of intellectual thought involved discomfort for Marxism." The Communist response has been to pretend that these critiques do not exist, and treat the writings of Marx, Engels and later Lenin and Stalin as sacred scriptures amenable to exegesis. People saw poverty and oppression around them and turned to a quasi-religion that encouraged them to turn off their critical facilities.
There were several Communist revolutions all over Europe in the aftermath of World War I, a horrible bloodbath that the leftists of the time thought was a product of capitalism and imperialism. The most famous one took place in Russia in 1917, headed by Vladimir Lenin, but there was also one in Hungary, headed by Béla Kun, and a bunch in smaller places. Russia is a big country with a large population and many natural resources, so the 1918-1920 foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War failed, and the Russian Revolution won, but all the others were suppressed. Afterwards, Communism was built in Russia, renamed the Soviet Union in 1923; here Service tells a familiar story; there is nothing in his book that is not also in a thousand other books. After the Soviet Union won World War II, the same model of society was forcibly imposed upon most of Eastern Europe. In 1949 a Communist revolution won in China, the world's most populous country. In the 1950s through the 1970s there were Communist revolutions in a bunch of Third World countries, from Cuba to Angola to Afghanistan. At the peak, a third of the Earth was ruled by governments that claimed to be Communist.
All these governments had something in common. They were single-party dictatorships (though in a few places like East Germany there were token non-Communist parties). The ruling party did not stand for elections any more than the Roman Catholic Church does in Vatican. It suppressed civil rights and due process. It suppressed independent media that could criticize its rule. Now, Service says, "Multi-party elections and civil rights do not produce rule by the people. There is overwhelming evidence that they benefit the rich and the powerful more than the poor and the weak." The Communists knew this much; what they failed to understand is that despite this, democracy and freedom offer a correction mechanism for abuses of power. Communist countries mobilized their populations for campaigns. Sometimes the results were unquestionably good. In China, land was redistributed and agriculture was collectivized more humanely than in the Soviet Union, which Service says is why hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants still revere Mao. Yet with the party not accountable to anybody, it could launch a campaign that ended up a disaster, and no one would stop it. A 1958 Chinese campaign to kill sparrows disrupted the ecology of rural China; a plague of insects ate up the harvest, exacerbating the 1958-1961 famine, causing tens of millions of deaths.
Service is an anti-Communist, but he wants to be fair to the movement he opposes. He says, "It cannot be stressed too heavily that not every inhuman action in the twentieth century was perpetrated by communists." Yet knowing that history is on your side gives one a certain impunity, like knowing that God is on your side. After the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the Chinese transition to capitalism, Communism has fallen out of popularity. Yet the forces that brought it about, political, economic and social oppression, are still there, though they now provoke a different reaction. The late Osama bin Laden would have been surprised to be compared to Lenin, but they both reacted to oppression with violence, hoping to bring about a perfect society, and were callous to the innocent people who might die in the process.
Communism, which is to say destroying the existing social order and replacing it with a new one based on human equality, is a very old idea, though the modern word only appeared in the 1840s. The founders of modern Communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A physicist will say that although Newton was a genius, he made mistakes; a Christian will not admit that Jesus made mistakes, and will find the question itself offensive. For a Communist, Marx is more like Jesus for a Christian than like Newton for a physicist. Marx wrote an analysis of capitalist political economy, Das Kapital. Eugen Böhm von Bawerk found flaws in it, and later so did Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes and many other economists. Historians and sociologists also found flaws with Marx's and Engels's analysis of society. As Service puts it, "Practically every sector of intellectual thought involved discomfort for Marxism." The Communist response has been to pretend that these critiques do not exist, and treat the writings of Marx, Engels and later Lenin and Stalin as sacred scriptures amenable to exegesis. People saw poverty and oppression around them and turned to a quasi-religion that encouraged them to turn off their critical facilities.
There were several Communist revolutions all over Europe in the aftermath of World War I, a horrible bloodbath that the leftists of the time thought was a product of capitalism and imperialism. The most famous one took place in Russia in 1917, headed by Vladimir Lenin, but there was also one in Hungary, headed by Béla Kun, and a bunch in smaller places. Russia is a big country with a large population and many natural resources, so the 1918-1920 foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War failed, and the Russian Revolution won, but all the others were suppressed. Afterwards, Communism was built in Russia, renamed the Soviet Union in 1923; here Service tells a familiar story; there is nothing in his book that is not also in a thousand other books. After the Soviet Union won World War II, the same model of society was forcibly imposed upon most of Eastern Europe. In 1949 a Communist revolution won in China, the world's most populous country. In the 1950s through the 1970s there were Communist revolutions in a bunch of Third World countries, from Cuba to Angola to Afghanistan. At the peak, a third of the Earth was ruled by governments that claimed to be Communist.
All these governments had something in common. They were single-party dictatorships (though in a few places like East Germany there were token non-Communist parties). The ruling party did not stand for elections any more than the Roman Catholic Church does in Vatican. It suppressed civil rights and due process. It suppressed independent media that could criticize its rule. Now, Service says, "Multi-party elections and civil rights do not produce rule by the people. There is overwhelming evidence that they benefit the rich and the powerful more than the poor and the weak." The Communists knew this much; what they failed to understand is that despite this, democracy and freedom offer a correction mechanism for abuses of power. Communist countries mobilized their populations for campaigns. Sometimes the results were unquestionably good. In China, land was redistributed and agriculture was collectivized more humanely than in the Soviet Union, which Service says is why hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants still revere Mao. Yet with the party not accountable to anybody, it could launch a campaign that ended up a disaster, and no one would stop it. A 1958 Chinese campaign to kill sparrows disrupted the ecology of rural China; a plague of insects ate up the harvest, exacerbating the 1958-1961 famine, causing tens of millions of deaths.
Service is an anti-Communist, but he wants to be fair to the movement he opposes. He says, "It cannot be stressed too heavily that not every inhuman action in the twentieth century was perpetrated by communists." Yet knowing that history is on your side gives one a certain impunity, like knowing that God is on your side. After the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the Chinese transition to capitalism, Communism has fallen out of popularity. Yet the forces that brought it about, political, economic and social oppression, are still there, though they now provoke a different reaction. The late Osama bin Laden would have been surprised to be compared to Lenin, but they both reacted to oppression with violence, hoping to bring about a perfect society, and were callous to the innocent people who might die in the process.
December 25, 2018
Right wing propaganda, skirta tiems, kurie neturi absoliučiai jokio supratimo apie socialdemokratiją, socializmą ir komunizmą. Lietuviškas knygos pavadinimo pakeitimas yra visiškai nevykęs. Kažkodėl autorius nusprendė parašyti pasaulinę socialistinių valstybių istoriją, nors jo kompetencija tėra SSRS istorija. Visiems, kurie labiau domisi marksizmu, bus akivaizdu, kad autoriui daug geriau rašo apie SSRS nei apie visas kitas valstybes. Knygoje išdėstomi elementarūs mokykliniai faktai apie tam tikrus SSRS istorijos įvykius,tokius kaip Spalio perversmas, ar invazijos į Vengriją ar Čekoslovakiją. Faktai, kurie nėra iš SSRS gyvavimo istorijos, yra smarkiai iškraipomi arba net apverčiami aukštyn kojomis. Čia paminėsiu tik vieną pavyzdį apie "Komunistų partijos manifestą". Autorius rašo:
"Atsiliepdami į savo kritikų argumentus, Marxas ir Engelsas pripažino, kad komunizmas panaikina amžinąsias tiesas, panaikina religiją, moralę, užuot jas atnaujinęs, taigi jis prieštarauja visai ligšiolinei istorijos(sic!) raidai".(P.35).
Pažiūrėkime, kaip iš tikrųjų rašoma Komunistų partijos manifeste:
„Bet", pasakys mums, „religinės, moralinės, filosofinės, politinės teisinės idėjos ir t. t., žinoma, keitėsi istorija besivystant. Tačiau religija, moralė, filosofija politika, teisė visuomet išliko toje nenutrūkstamoje kaitoje.
Be to, esama ir amžinų tiesų kaip laisvė, teisingumas ir t. t., kurios yra bendros visoms visuomenės raidos stadijoms. O komunizmas panaikina amžinąsias tiesas, jis panaikina religiją, moralę, užuot suteikęs joms naują pavidalą, taigi jis prieštarauja visai ligšiolinei istorijos raidai".
Kokia šio kaltinimo esmė? Visų ligšioliniu visuomenių istoriją sudarė vystymasis klasių priešingumų, kurie įvairiose epochose, buvo Įvairaus pavidalo".
Iš tikrųjų Marxas su Engelsu Komunistų partijos manifeste tik citavo priešininkų kaltinimą, o ne taip teigė! Marxas su Engelsu rašo: "Kokia šio kaltinimo esmė?". Service galvoja, kad jis pričiupo Marxą su Engelsu, nes šioje citatoje jie tarsi paneigia savo ankstesnius teiginius apie klasių kovos istoriją, nors taip iš tikrųjų nėra.
Būtų galima ištisai cituoti kiekvieną puslapį ir aiškinti, kodėl šioje ar kitoje vietoje autorius viską labai stipriai supaprastina arba pasirenka tik sau naudingus faktus.
Dar pačioje įžangoje autorius teigia: "Aš neištyrinėjau visų iki vienos komunistų idėjos, jų lyderių ir partijų veiklos bei visų komunistinių valstybių"(P.9.). Autorius nusprendė pasirinkti tik tokias valstybes ir politinius veikėjus, kurie tinka jo ideologijai. Knygoje nerasite nei vieno sakinio apie Burkina Faso politinė veikėją Thomą Sankarą, kuris kovojo prieš prancūzų imperializmą(neokolonializmą), rėmė vietinės produkcijos gamybą, sumažino valdžios privilegijas, vakcinavo 2.5 vaikų nuo meningito, geltonosios karštilės ir tymų(tuo metų visoje šalyje buvo apie 7 milijonus žmonių). Autorius rašo "pasaulinę komunizmo istoriją" ir nepamiršta paminėti Etiopijos, tačiau beveik neabejoju kad Burkina Fasas buvo pamirštas sąmoningai. Thomas Sankara valdė tik ketverius metus, kol buvo nužudytas ir didžioji dalis jo palikimo buvo sunaikinta. Po jo į valdžią atėjo Blaise Compaore, kurio diktatūra tęsėsi 27 metus.
Skaityti tokią knygą yra tas pats kaip skaityti Lietuvos Laisvosios Rinkos Instituto (LLRI)leidžiamas propagandines knygas.
"Atsiliepdami į savo kritikų argumentus, Marxas ir Engelsas pripažino, kad komunizmas panaikina amžinąsias tiesas, panaikina religiją, moralę, užuot jas atnaujinęs, taigi jis prieštarauja visai ligšiolinei istorijos(sic!) raidai".(P.35).
Pažiūrėkime, kaip iš tikrųjų rašoma Komunistų partijos manifeste:
„Bet", pasakys mums, „religinės, moralinės, filosofinės, politinės teisinės idėjos ir t. t., žinoma, keitėsi istorija besivystant. Tačiau religija, moralė, filosofija politika, teisė visuomet išliko toje nenutrūkstamoje kaitoje.
Be to, esama ir amžinų tiesų kaip laisvė, teisingumas ir t. t., kurios yra bendros visoms visuomenės raidos stadijoms. O komunizmas panaikina amžinąsias tiesas, jis panaikina religiją, moralę, užuot suteikęs joms naują pavidalą, taigi jis prieštarauja visai ligšiolinei istorijos raidai".
Kokia šio kaltinimo esmė? Visų ligšioliniu visuomenių istoriją sudarė vystymasis klasių priešingumų, kurie įvairiose epochose, buvo Įvairaus pavidalo".
Iš tikrųjų Marxas su Engelsu Komunistų partijos manifeste tik citavo priešininkų kaltinimą, o ne taip teigė! Marxas su Engelsu rašo: "Kokia šio kaltinimo esmė?". Service galvoja, kad jis pričiupo Marxą su Engelsu, nes šioje citatoje jie tarsi paneigia savo ankstesnius teiginius apie klasių kovos istoriją, nors taip iš tikrųjų nėra.
Būtų galima ištisai cituoti kiekvieną puslapį ir aiškinti, kodėl šioje ar kitoje vietoje autorius viską labai stipriai supaprastina arba pasirenka tik sau naudingus faktus.
Dar pačioje įžangoje autorius teigia: "Aš neištyrinėjau visų iki vienos komunistų idėjos, jų lyderių ir partijų veiklos bei visų komunistinių valstybių"(P.9.). Autorius nusprendė pasirinkti tik tokias valstybes ir politinius veikėjus, kurie tinka jo ideologijai. Knygoje nerasite nei vieno sakinio apie Burkina Faso politinė veikėją Thomą Sankarą, kuris kovojo prieš prancūzų imperializmą(neokolonializmą), rėmė vietinės produkcijos gamybą, sumažino valdžios privilegijas, vakcinavo 2.5 vaikų nuo meningito, geltonosios karštilės ir tymų(tuo metų visoje šalyje buvo apie 7 milijonus žmonių). Autorius rašo "pasaulinę komunizmo istoriją" ir nepamiršta paminėti Etiopijos, tačiau beveik neabejoju kad Burkina Fasas buvo pamirštas sąmoningai. Thomas Sankara valdė tik ketverius metus, kol buvo nužudytas ir didžioji dalis jo palikimo buvo sunaikinta. Po jo į valdžią atėjo Blaise Compaore, kurio diktatūra tęsėsi 27 metus.
Skaityti tokią knygą yra tas pats kaip skaityti Lietuvos Laisvosios Rinkos Instituto (LLRI)leidžiamas propagandines knygas.
August 2, 2017
A world history of communism is indeed an ambitious and equally audacious endeavour, however Robert Service does a good job of it . At times you may find him glossing over important events and periods but then that's all you can afford to do in a single volume.
The font size is really small and reading it , at times may be quite arduous. Contrary to the criticism vented by other readers the book is quite fast paced with short and crisp chapters .
Good beginning for some one wanting to get an insight of a social and political order that's debated and deliberated over generations across the globe !
The font size is really small and reading it , at times may be quite arduous. Contrary to the criticism vented by other readers the book is quite fast paced with short and crisp chapters .
Good beginning for some one wanting to get an insight of a social and political order that's debated and deliberated over generations across the globe !
August 6, 2016
Awful book . I though I was going to get a good look of communism in the Soviet Union and other countries but instead all I got was an opinionated repetition of concepts already told quite a few times.book is not written very well . I already knew much of the infos exposed so nothing new or interested in in here . The black book of communism is much better if you want a book against communism but if you look for an informative book about the Soviet Union this ain't one of them .
January 24, 2009
A history of Communism, from its antecedents, through Marx, the founding of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Revolution, to the fall of Communism. The author includes a lot of information about Communism in small countries that generally don't get a lot of press. The book is somewhat sweeping, given all the ground the author has to cover, but overall, a worthwhile read.
August 11, 2014
Out of Service's books on Communism, this is both his broadest and unfortunately, his weakest. The scope is impressive, particularly in the particulars of communism in lesser-known situations such as in Chile or during the Spanish Civil War. However, it often feels like the author is merely rushing over facts without much time for further analysis or in-depth study.
August 21, 2007
Terrific on the theory and application of communism, and how they developed in various countries over time. Only problem is it's such a big subject some incidents in Soviet history get glossed over. But it's still brilliant.
January 7, 2010
I would have liked more in-depth coverage of the various Eastern European incarnations, and even China's place is smaller than would be expected. However, considering the breadth of material, it does well for itself.
April 10, 2013
Excellent effort to compose the complete history of communism, it would be excellent, if he kept his biased opinions in control. All I can say, is it is another effort of talk low about communism in general. The author should have given due credits as well.
Overall, a good book to read!!!
Overall, a good book to read!!!
August 1, 2011
I didn't get past the second chapter. Way too dense.
March 24, 2015
A good and general view of communism in the world
June 1, 2024
"In March 1991 he held a referendum across the USSR. The question was: 'Do you believe it essential to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?' The turnout was high and 76 percent of the ballot papers had a cross in favor of Gorbachev's objective."
-Robert Service, "Comrades"
So, more than 3/4ths of Soviet citizens wanted to preserve the USSR. And yet by the end of the same year, the USSR ceased to exist. Robert Service, in a terrible history of communism, utterly fails to explain why this happened.
His book really should call itself a history of anti-communism, because Service despises it. Moreover, it should be noted to any who might be interested that the book primarily covers the Soviet Union, much to the book's detriment. In this 500 page book - which really should be at least twice as long to actually satisfy its objective - Service gives about 40 pages to the People's Republic of China; 10 pages to revolutionary Cuba; 10 pages to Yugoslavia; a few pages each to North Korea and Vietnam; and any history of the so-called Eastern Bloc is entirely how those countries related to the USSR. Socialist projects in Ethiopia, Chile, Nicaragua, Laos, Afghanistan etc. get literally only a few paragraphs each. Socialism in Yemen gets ONE sentence, a dismissive one at that. Burkina Faso and Thomas Sankara are not mentioned at all. Organizations like the Zapatistas get just a few paragraphs at the very end of the book, and the Black Panther Party is not mentioned at all. Neither is Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Almost the entirety of this book is a bad history of the USSR.
There is very little in here that would reveal to anyone why left wing politics would have been popular. The achievements of socialist countries are largely ignored, or they're mentioned in brief asides as if they're irrelevant. "Yes, Castro and the communists taught illiterate peasants how to read and made the healthcare system the marvel of Latin America, BUT DID YOU ALSO KNOW CONSERVATIVES AND FORMER GANGSTERS FLED TO FLORIDA ON RAFTS BECAUSE OF COMMUNISM???????"
"Comrades" is also replete with fact errors and mischaracterizations of historical events. One of my favorites comes pretty early on, when Service claims the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman "moved to Russia" in 1919 when the United States LITERALLY DEPORTED THEM TO RUSSIA BECAUSE OF THEIR POLITICS. That was also the time period when Soviet Russia was being invaded by all of the Allied forces, which Service does not mention until the FINAL CHAPTER of the book, and in one sentence no less. This fact could have gone a long way in explaining why the Soviets were so concerned with defending themselves militarily, but instead Service just criticizes their militarism without bothering to try to explain it. Some fact errors are simply outright lazy, such as a reference to the Gulag during the Gorbachev era, even though by then the last Gulag had been closed for over two decades, or saying that North America never really tried to ban communist parties - apparently Service had never heard of the Communist Control Act.
Service also is sometimes downright offensive with his framing. He frames the USSR's elimination of unemployment during the 1930s as tyrannical, when much of the world was dealing with mass unemployment as a result of the Great Depression. He portrays Kremlin orders to the CPUSA to incorporate Black people into the Party and trade unions as cynical; he does the same with Castro staying in Harlem when he visited New York. Apparently communists were actually not really interested in fighting racism and simply using America's racism to make it look bad!
I don't recommend this book to anyone. There are many better history books about socialism/communism. A few that I DO recommend: "October: The Story of the Russian Revolution"; "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life"; "The Romance of American Communism"; and "Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism." The last book tells you the impact of what happened in 1991 and beyond when the socialist states were not preserved, but ceased to exist. The utter chaos and mass poverty and are only hinted at in a few sentences in Service's book. Service occasionally points to real problems that existed under socialist systems, but he often never explains them, or he hypocritically casts a light upon them without holding up the liberal democracies to the mirror. This is a bad history book. Don't read it.
-Robert Service, "Comrades"
So, more than 3/4ths of Soviet citizens wanted to preserve the USSR. And yet by the end of the same year, the USSR ceased to exist. Robert Service, in a terrible history of communism, utterly fails to explain why this happened.
His book really should call itself a history of anti-communism, because Service despises it. Moreover, it should be noted to any who might be interested that the book primarily covers the Soviet Union, much to the book's detriment. In this 500 page book - which really should be at least twice as long to actually satisfy its objective - Service gives about 40 pages to the People's Republic of China; 10 pages to revolutionary Cuba; 10 pages to Yugoslavia; a few pages each to North Korea and Vietnam; and any history of the so-called Eastern Bloc is entirely how those countries related to the USSR. Socialist projects in Ethiopia, Chile, Nicaragua, Laos, Afghanistan etc. get literally only a few paragraphs each. Socialism in Yemen gets ONE sentence, a dismissive one at that. Burkina Faso and Thomas Sankara are not mentioned at all. Organizations like the Zapatistas get just a few paragraphs at the very end of the book, and the Black Panther Party is not mentioned at all. Neither is Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Almost the entirety of this book is a bad history of the USSR.
There is very little in here that would reveal to anyone why left wing politics would have been popular. The achievements of socialist countries are largely ignored, or they're mentioned in brief asides as if they're irrelevant. "Yes, Castro and the communists taught illiterate peasants how to read and made the healthcare system the marvel of Latin America, BUT DID YOU ALSO KNOW CONSERVATIVES AND FORMER GANGSTERS FLED TO FLORIDA ON RAFTS BECAUSE OF COMMUNISM???????"
"Comrades" is also replete with fact errors and mischaracterizations of historical events. One of my favorites comes pretty early on, when Service claims the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman "moved to Russia" in 1919 when the United States LITERALLY DEPORTED THEM TO RUSSIA BECAUSE OF THEIR POLITICS. That was also the time period when Soviet Russia was being invaded by all of the Allied forces, which Service does not mention until the FINAL CHAPTER of the book, and in one sentence no less. This fact could have gone a long way in explaining why the Soviets were so concerned with defending themselves militarily, but instead Service just criticizes their militarism without bothering to try to explain it. Some fact errors are simply outright lazy, such as a reference to the Gulag during the Gorbachev era, even though by then the last Gulag had been closed for over two decades, or saying that North America never really tried to ban communist parties - apparently Service had never heard of the Communist Control Act.
Service also is sometimes downright offensive with his framing. He frames the USSR's elimination of unemployment during the 1930s as tyrannical, when much of the world was dealing with mass unemployment as a result of the Great Depression. He portrays Kremlin orders to the CPUSA to incorporate Black people into the Party and trade unions as cynical; he does the same with Castro staying in Harlem when he visited New York. Apparently communists were actually not really interested in fighting racism and simply using America's racism to make it look bad!
I don't recommend this book to anyone. There are many better history books about socialism/communism. A few that I DO recommend: "October: The Story of the Russian Revolution"; "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life"; "The Romance of American Communism"; and "Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism." The last book tells you the impact of what happened in 1991 and beyond when the socialist states were not preserved, but ceased to exist. The utter chaos and mass poverty and are only hinted at in a few sentences in Service's book. Service occasionally points to real problems that existed under socialist systems, but he often never explains them, or he hypocritically casts a light upon them without holding up the liberal democracies to the mirror. This is a bad history book. Don't read it.
January 16, 2025
Unlike a lot of the reviews on this app, I thought this was well written. It’s a bit “direct” but I appreciate that approach given the type and scope of the subject matter.
However this is more of a synthesis/primer on the topic that doesn’t present any new arguments. Nor is there a great deal of new research from what I could glean from the notes pages. Neither of these things make the book “bad,” but they don’t put the book in the “great” category either.
Also, Service is way too Euro-centric in this book. I think Albania is mentioned in more pages than Vietnam, Cambodia, DPRK, and Angola combined. Also, what about the role that Marxism-Leninism played in the PFLP, PKK, DFLP, etc.? Also, very blatant (and easily corrected) chronological and factual errors in the pages dealing with Cambodia and Vietnam that should have been caught by the editor.
This is a good book, but it falls short of being truly comprehensive. Service should take note of what Odd Arne Westad did in his book on the Cold War and be much more broad with his analysis. 482 pages of text can be expanded upon.
However this is more of a synthesis/primer on the topic that doesn’t present any new arguments. Nor is there a great deal of new research from what I could glean from the notes pages. Neither of these things make the book “bad,” but they don’t put the book in the “great” category either.
Also, Service is way too Euro-centric in this book. I think Albania is mentioned in more pages than Vietnam, Cambodia, DPRK, and Angola combined. Also, what about the role that Marxism-Leninism played in the PFLP, PKK, DFLP, etc.? Also, very blatant (and easily corrected) chronological and factual errors in the pages dealing with Cambodia and Vietnam that should have been caught by the editor.
This is a good book, but it falls short of being truly comprehensive. Service should take note of what Odd Arne Westad did in his book on the Cold War and be much more broad with his analysis. 482 pages of text can be expanded upon.
September 17, 2020
See raamat oli mul umbes aasta aega riiulis. Pärast "Musta raamatu" lõpetamist mõtlesin, et maitsen vaid veidi sedagi sissejuhatavatelt lehekülgedelt. Lõpuks aga lugesin terve raamatu läbi. Arvasin enne lugemist, et erilist uut informatsiooni ma sellisest üldkäsitlusest ei leia, kuid olen positiivselt üllatunud. Põnevat uut infot oli siin raamatus mullegi, kes ma olen üsna palju sel teemal juba lugenud. Meeldivad olid ka emeriit Robert Service'i tõlgendused ja temaatika mõtestamiskäigud, see tähendab, et raamat oli võrdlemisi sidus narratiiv, mis puudutas riike ja komparteisid igalt kontinendilt.
Raamatu negatiivne külg oli tõlge. See oli lonkav ning häirivalt palju oli sees lohakusvigu ning kohatigi arusaamatuid lauseid.
Raamatu negatiivne külg oli tõlge. See oli lonkav ning häirivalt palju oli sees lohakusvigu ning kohatigi arusaamatuid lauseid.
September 10, 2020
I'm afraid to say that I only got halfway through this book before I gave it away.
Not because it isn't a good account of a very big subject, but because it's a very big book and you probably need to be very interested in Communism to read it.
It's certainly not light reading, but as a comprehensive account to read in sections, it's pretty definitive.
Not because it isn't a good account of a very big subject, but because it's a very big book and you probably need to be very interested in Communism to read it.
It's certainly not light reading, but as a comprehensive account to read in sections, it's pretty definitive.
November 22, 2024
É longe de ser um livro super detalhado (a proposta dele em si não permitiria isso). Porém, é uma boa leitura para quem quer entender de forma mais geral os movimentos comunistas que se deram no século XX.
August 3, 2025
Extremely knowledgeable author, who despite a text dense with facts left me with the impression of having understood new things about a part of history, and what in humanity that will allow authorities to rise whatever their name.
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