Comrades: A World History of Communism
Robert Service Macmillan, 624pp, £25
Communist governments, during the 50 years they dominated half of the European continent, proclaimed their adherence to Marxist-Leninism, a body of thought meant to be universal in its application and internationalist in its outlook. Soviet-style autocracy, which had deep roots in Russian nationalism and imperialism, represented a particular application of the system - but became inextricably identified with it after the revolution of October 1917. "Soviet Man", a model of humanity trapped in the bureaucratic consequences of uncompetitive economics, came to be seen as the apotheosis of Marxism as mediated by V I Lenin. Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, discussion of communism is still dominated by the "Russian question" and the country's 20th-century travails.
But communism did not just draw on an internationalist perspective in its theories; its practical consequences were global, too. A 19th-century European philosophy became the continent's most powerful doctrinal export to Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is to the restoration of this global sense of connection that Robert Service devotes himself in the dazzlingly synoptic pages of a book that bears all the hallmarks of a classic work of historical literature.
The sense of living in the latter days, of being on the verge of a great transformation in human society, united the first communists of the 19th century. Service's urgent and lucid prose describes to brilliant effect their indebtedness to previous millenarians: early Christian expectations of a second coming, the Franciscan movement's rejection of riches, the Utopian anticipations of Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella, Rousseau's advocacy of an egalitarian order purged of "unnatural" social division, the "primitive socialism" of Fourier and Proudhon. This made for a rich, if diffuse, tradition of discontent with the established order. But it took Marx's scholarly ambition - allied to the journalistic flair of his early years - to create a systematic account of communism as the ordained future.
Sanctioned by the supposed laws of historical development and erupting out of the carcass of capitalism, the communist future described by both Marx and Engels was a thoroughly 19th-century production. It was confident of its own superior grasp of fundamental truths elaborated according to the laws of a science of society that was evolutionary and purposive. Both men grasped, correctly, the global nature of the emergent world economy and both had a casually dismissive attitude towards historical "losers" - whether they were individuals or whole peoples.
Historical sociology being, for them, a bloodlessly objective affair, it was idle sentiment to complain about capitalism's effects on a humanitarian basis. History's sweep showed how suffering had its place as the necessary precursor to advance and progress. There's no room in Service's pages for the sentimental view that separates Marx the "humanist" from the violence embraced by his followers. Recognition of force as an indispensable element in government was part of the doctrine right from the beginning, and many of the views advanced by both Marx and Engels about some of the Slav nations show communism's genocidal origins. Smaller nations had to be absorbed within superior cultures - German in the case of the Slavs - before they could be admitted into the onward march of civilisation.
Communism's lack of interest in peasant-based politics and the role of national identity proved to be a persistent fault-line. Marx himself was inconsistent on the central issue of whether industrialisation had to precede socialism and thought that Russia's agrarian socialists (or narodniki) might have grasped the heart of the matter. But the party apparatus as it developed first in Russia, then in the countries of the Warsaw Pact after the Second World War, was a persistently urban mechanism, attempting to control societies that were an uneasy amalgam of peasant traditionalism and fast-decaying heavy industries. That the apparatus collapsed is partly attributable to bureaucracy's endemically self-interested nature. But the crisis of a dislocation between a managerial elite and the citizenry became especially acute in communist societies because their administrations were run by and for the party.
At the heart of this great work there lies an account of a central paradox that has rarely been highlighted to such effect. How and why did communism's internationalist impulses collapse into autarchy so easily and rapidly?
Communist states devoted enormous energy and resources to the task of isolating those they ruled from contact with foreign influences. In the cases of Russia and China, there were centuries-long national traditions at work. But Marx and Engels were genuinely cosmopolitan figures and, initially, communist parties in certain countries - Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for example - shared some of that outlook. As Service shows, with a stupendous wealth of documentary detail, it was the remorseless facts of economic failure that turned the communist states inwards. News from elsewhere provided evidence of greater prosperity in the democratic west and therefore posed a threat to regimes that turned to networks of spies and informants, prisons and labour camps for political dissenters, in order to survive. Envy over prosperity also evolved into official disapproval of capitalism's popular culture in films and music. Communist peoples had to be protected against such hedonism, and those who ran their lives preached a sobriety that gave the lie to communist utopianism.
Few observers in 1917 thought that the revolutionary order in Russia would last - even the Bolsheviks themselves kept their suitcases packed. The confidence of the communists at the level of ideology was not matched by their own practice in any of the societies they governed. Knowing themselves to be a minority, they had to resort to force, political banditry and repression to assert their will. Service's account of how they managed to get away with it in the countries of eastern Europe in the late 1940s is a prodigious narrative feat.
These were societies with a long history of internal dissent, first directed against established dynastic government and then against precarious parliamentary regimes. That instability gave eastern European communist leaders their opportunity, but it also meant that a monopoly of force was the only way in which they could cling to power.
At one level, the history of these and other communist governments is that of a supreme confidence trick - communist control relied on apathy to make itself effective. It was an illusion that claimed the lives of millions. That was the true international legacy of communism, analysed to magisterial effect in this exhilarating work.
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