TY - JOUR
AU1 - Burds,, Jeffrey
AB - Traditional studies of Communism typically identify three phases in its history: the era of ideology, 1844–1902, when philosophers and pundits laid out the basic theories and arguments regarding the history of class conflict and its ultimate resolution; the era of revolution, 1902–1917, when Communism became a blueprint for revolutionary change and the seizure of state power; and the era of Communist states, 1917–1989, when Communism was transformed from revolutionary theory into a how-to guide for socialist state and social practices. The Cambridge History of Communism represents a comprehensive and persuasive rewrite of the history of international Communism in the twentieth century. In place of the usual approach dominated by ideologically driven attacks on all things Communist, we find here a collective of social scientists who have endeavored to embrace a decentered, politically neutral line. The three long volumes in The Cambridge History of Communism—comprised of seventy-five thoughtful articles in nearly two thousand pages of text—focus on Communism in practice and on Communism as official state ideology among regimes around the world from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. In stark contrast to most Western writing on the history of Communism, these authors have endeavored to strip their subjects of ideology and embrace a post–Cold War ideal of writing history—not write political essays under the guise of scholarly research. The result is a welcome new set of perspectives on national and international history, which revises our views of both regional and world history in fundamental ways. The first seven articles in volume 1, World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917–1941, are introductions to the history of both the Communist seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and the brutal civil war that followed. Prepared by leading research scholars in the Soviet field, these contributions are largely based on published historiography and summarize key aspects of the Russian revolutionary era. While the authors have presented a good summary of the ubiquitous violence of that era, the legacy of Communist violence is not the primary objective. Rather, together the authors tell the riveting story of how an extremist party in Russia managed to seize power by November 1917, and how the Communists managed against all odds to retain that power. Of special note are two pieces on Lenin and Stalin as “historical personalities,” the first written by Robert Service, and the second by James Harris. Unlike the cardboard cutouts of Communist leadership presented in ideologically charged studies like The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997), these essays are both nuanced and balanced, presenting Lenin and Stalin as human leaders driven as much by realpolitik and personal histories and events as by Communist ideology. I loved the piece by John Paul Newman entitled “Revolution and Counterrevolution in Europe, 1917–1923,” which offers a welcome Pan-European context to the Russian Civil War. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta contributed an especially interesting article entitled “Communism and the Crisis of the Colonial System.” Gupta’s essay focuses on the notorious “colonial theses” introduced at the Second Congress of the Comintern (Communist International) in 1920. The core issue here is that Lenin’s own theses on colonial peoples were contradicted by the “supplementary theses” introduced by Indian Communist M. N. Roy. Lenin’s theses linked anticolonial, anti-Western movements directly to the struggle of proletarian revolution. In practice, this meant that the Comintern must welcome and provide assistance to bourgeois nationalist movements in the Third World. In contrast, Roy’s theses utterly rejected bourgeois nationalism as an accomplice of imperialism, even in the Third World. In practice, this would have meant that the Comintern would support only truly radical revolutionary movements in the Third World and not all anticolonial struggles. Gupta follows the legacy of these conflicting principles in the early anticolonial movements of Asia and Southeast Asia. Two additional essays focus on the Comintern’s role in other movements: “The Comintern as a World Network” and “The Popular Fronts and the Civil War in Spain,” by Serge Wolikow and Tim Rees, respectively. What is sorely missing from the first half of the first volume is any global context based on efforts to intervene inside Russia from 1917 to 1921. After years of reading on this subject, I am persuaded that many of the worst vestiges of Communist violence did not occur in a vacuum; rather, the early Communist leadership’s resort to violence represented a response to crisis (peasant resistance, or forced grain requisitions) or to hostile Western paramilitary operations. This is certainly the case in Lenin’s decision to order the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family on July 17, 1918, which we now know was a direct response to the efforts of King George V to rescue the tsarina (his first cousin) and her family. And the launch of the Red Terror in autumn 1918 was certainly a response to assassinations of leading Soviet officials and the attempted assassination of Lenin himself on August 30, 1918. The second half of the first volume presents eleven essays summarizing (mainly) the state of Soviet historiography on Stalin’s consolidation of state power on the eve of World War II, from 1924 to 1941, and four more essays on the broader Eurasian context. In the opening essay of part 2, Hiroaki Kuromiya brilliantly summarizes the relationship between Communism, violence, and terror in Stalin’s rise to power: “Terror and violence are endemic to dictatorships. In the history of political violence, the Soviet practice marked a new stage. Political violence was ideologically justified and exercised by the first communist state in world history. Backed by Moscow, communists elsewhere also resorted to violence as a political weapon” (1:279). Here Kuromiya takes a bow to The Black Book of Communism (1997) and its lead essay by Nicolas Werth. In this way, Kuromiya seems to embrace the controversial Black Book and its conclusions. But a close reading of Kuromiya’s essay substantially reduces the absurdly exaggerated data of the Black Book, presenting numbers that are a fraction of those in the Black Book—chronicling evil, yes, but on a much smaller scale than the scales of atrocities depicted in the Soviet-bashing typical of Cold War and post–Cold War Western historiography. Also notable is Mark Harrison’s insightful work in his essay “Foundations of the Soviet Command Economy, 1917–1941.” What scholars tend to ignore is the fact that the Soviet Union played a leading role in the defeat of Nazism in World War II. In this essay, Harrison summarizes how the Soviet Union managed to outproduce the vaunted German war machine in World War II. Following this lead, several other essays discuss the ways in which Stalin mobilized the support of the Soviet people (workers, peasants, women, national minorities). Such nuance makes for a delightful read, and it is a solid rejoinder to the Black Book’s simplistic conflation of Communism, totalitarianism, and violence. The power of Stalinism rested in Stalin’s uncanny ability to mobilize popular support in the dismantling of their own rights and privileges in the evolving Soviet state. In some of the final essays of the first volume, we find a number of interesting studies: Brigitte Studer’s “Communism as Existential Choice” explores the interwar fellow travelers sympathetic to Communism; Eric D. Weitz writes on German Communism; Alexander V. Pantsov discusses the Chinese Communist movement; and Adeeb Khalid presents an especially interesting essay on Soviet Communist state building in Mongolia and Central Asia. What I found most fascinating here was Khalid’s persuasive take on “national communism”—the embrace of Soviet Communism as a rational choice by national minorities, where “non-Russians saw social revolution as intertwined with national liberation” (1:623). Khalid describes the emergence of a Pan-Islamic movement under the Soviets, which identified Soviet power not as a new brand of colonialism but rather as a legitimate road toward independence. While this basic fact has become a central tenet of subaltern studies, the genuinely close affinity between Moscow and anticolonialism in the early days after the revolution is generally greeted skeptically in mainstream Western historiography. Volume 2, The Socialist Camp and World Power, 1941–1960s, follows the history of international Communism from World War II through the tumultuous era of the 1960s. While three-quarters of the essays in the first volume focuses on the Soviet Union, here the essays and format are far more global in design and perspective. There are two essays on the Soviet Union; three essays on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; one essay on Europe; one thematic essay on the Cold War; five essays on China; two essays on Communism and the Third World; two essays on Cuba and Latin America; seven essays on the respective histories of national Communism in Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, India, Africa, the Middle East, and Yugoslavia; and three closing essays summarizing Communist movements in Italy, France, and the United States. This second volume opens with a solid article by Evan Mawdsley, “World War II, Soviet Power and International Communism.” Mawdsley underlines the fact that for the first two decades of the Communist International, the Soviet Union was a “marginal factor in world affairs,” and Communist parties around the world were fringe movements with little or no real political power or influence on national life. In contrast, by the end of the 1940s the Soviet Union would emerge as “one of two global superpowers” (2:15), and the extension of Soviet power to postwar Eastern Europe, the 1949 Chinese Communist revolution, and the partitioning of Korea would all bring a third of the world population into the Communist sphere. Because of Stalin’s role in the liberation of Europe from Nazism, the Soviet Union enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout Europe—a fact that deeply affected U.S. and British postwar policies in the region. And because of those pesky conflicting “colonial theses” of Lenin and Roy back in 1920, the Soviet Union had become a recognized leader in the global anticolonial movement. In his essay, Mawdsley traces evolving events and their impact on the postwar ascendancy of the Soviet Union into world politics. Mawdsley underlines the essential paradox of Soviet success as a world power: even as the war had catapulted the Soviets onto the world stage, the so-called Red Scare and the postwar backlash against Communist influence would relegate national Communist parties to the margins of Western society. Moscow’s ascendancy as a world military and political force brought a crushing reactionary blow against global Communism. Among the most notable contributions to the second volume is a thought-provoking article by Johan Franzén entitled “Communism in the Arab World and Iran.” Franzén notes the preeminent role of foreign intellectuals in the early history of Middle Eastern Communism at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the leadership roles among Middle Eastern Communists would shift to “local Arabs and Jews” after the First World War (2:553), and break apart again after World War II over the Israel question. By the 1950s, the emerging dominant Soviet role in Middle Eastern politics would generate a new era in which Soviet weapons and aid would be welcomed, but Communist ideology would not. Khrushchev therefore introduced a new era emphasizing “political independence from imperialism” for Soviet allies around the world, without the expectations of full-scale communization. “From the outbreak of the Cold War,” Franzén notes, “Soviet foreign policy became dominated by concerns of ‘national interest,’ rather than ‘world revolution’” (2:562). Growing Soviet indifference toward revolutionism was, of course, catastrophic for national Communist movements all over the world. As Franzén concludes, “By the 1970s, the communist movement in the Arab world and Iran was as good as dead” (2:567). Soviet national interests had trumped Communist internationalism, and more often than not local Communist cadres were placed in an “impossible situation.” Nowhere was this Communist decline clearer than in the United States. In his provocative essay “American Communism,” Phillip Deery is the only scholar in nearly two thousand pages to note the recent emergence in reductionist mainstream conservative historiography (e.g., Allen Weinstein, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes) of a hasty generalization that dismisses U.S. progressivism and instead depicts the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) as nothing more than a weapon for Soviet espionage. Deery’s retort is clear and persuasive: “A clear historical delineation must be drawn between that small handful of communists who passed classified information to the Soviet Union, and the average rank-and-file communist who neither knew of it nor approved of it. Of the approximately 50,000 American communists in World War II, about 49,700 were not involved in espionage. But both groups have been tarred with the same brush of betrayal . . . Regardless, communism, subversion and spying became synonymous in the public mind and would haunt the CPUSA throughout the McCarthy period” (2:652). Deery’s pages on the lives of “ordinary communists” during what playwright Lillian Hellman dubbed that “scoundrel time” of the U.S. 1950s is a poignant summary showing the true meaning of political intolerance in a democratic society (2:656–658). One of the best features of Deery’s essay is the way he traces the shifts in Moscow’s policy and the repercussions these abrupt changes had on rank-and-file Communists in the United States. Curiously, Deery made no mention of the August 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, when more than three-quarters of American Communists (including most Jews) would abruptly resign from the Communist Party. But Deery does trace other Moscow shifts quite well, especially Khrushchev’s secret speech in February 1956. Volume 3, Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present, follows the history of international Communism from 1968 to the present, where the editors make a concerted effort to emphasize “the international and global aspects of the era” (3:4). Here we find pivotal events in global history tied to global Communism and the global struggle in the Cold War: “The Global 1968 and International Communism” (Robert Gildea), “The Vietnam War as a World Event” (Marilyn B. Young and Sophie Quinn-Judge), and “The Soviet Union and the Global Cold War” (Artemy M. Kalinovsky). From these three strong global perspectives, the volume moves to essays on post–Cold War national Communism in Latin America and Africa, in Cambodia, in Europe, and in China. There are also generalized essays on Communism and human rights, Soviet economic theory, youth culture, religion, media, literature, 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, gender, and the environment; three comparative essays on Communist legacies close the volume. There is an emphasis throughout on “the diverging fates of Soviet and Chinese communism” (3:7), and an explicit refusal to embrace Fukuyama’s pronouncement in 1989 about the demise of Communism at the end of the Cold War. Among the most fascinating essays in the whole volume were the first three transnational pieces. Robert Gildea’s “The Global 1968 and International Communism” captures the era of the 1960s and the global resurgence of the Left as rival models competed among grassroots activists: with Mao’s China, Fidel’s (or Che’s) Cuba, and Trotsky alongside Gandhi’s satyagraha, the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X’s more militant brand of black nationalism. Twenty years after the end of World War II, the world’s youth were condemning official corruption, demanding change, and openly challenging the legitimacy of governmental authority around the world. Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? (1967), based on the lessons of the revolution in Cuba, convinced many youths of the inevitability of their victory as a protracted people’s war. In this tumultuous context, “the Vietnam War and massive American bombing raids on the north after February 1965 . . . catalyzed and universalized the student and youth movements.” The moral imperative of the 1960s was to stop the Vietnam War: “Vietnam was seen as the battlefield on which the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism would be decided” (3:32). The irony is that global 1968 was a self-sustaining mass-cultural and political movement that simultaneously defied both Washington and Moscow. Even as Soviet officials were cracking down on “Western decadence,” Western governments were convinced that Moscow’s hidden hand lurked behind every popular demonstration. After that “August of Sixty-Hate,” as Soviet dissident writer Vasily Aksyonov dubbed Moscow’s armed intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, there could no longer be any legitimate Soviet role in global anticolonialism. Gildea rightly points to the disillusionment of protesters following the worldwide crackdowns that followed, and how this inevitably led to a “descent into terrorism” (3:42). The author would have benefited from a reading of provocative new work by Marian K. Leighton (“Strange Bedfellows: The Stasi and the Terrorists,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 27, no. 4 [2014]: 647–665), the first to explore persuasively the intimate relationship between Moscow and terrorism—not just European terrorists like the Red Guard or the Baader-Meinhof Gang, but Middle Eastern terrorism as well (the Black September Organization, or the Abu Nidal Organization). Which would suggest that Moscow, dogged by Chinese and Cuban rivalries, grew impatient with trying to exert influence through national Communist movements and increasingly relied on covert operations in the last two decades of the Cold War. Several essays in this volume that trace the demise of national Communist parties around the world support this conclusion. In their essay “The Vietnam War as a World Event,” Marilyn B. Young and Sophie Quinn-Judge offer a useful microhistory of global protest against the Vietnam War. In particular, the authors (quoting Chen Jian) persuasively argue that for the Chinese Communist leadership, the war “became a ‘litmus test for “true communism,”’ a way to prove ‘that the center of the world revolution had moved from Moscow to Beijing’” (3:51). Which would suggest that Moscow invested less in Communist movements from the 1960s because it had been replaced by Beijing as the ideological epicenter of world Communism. Against that backdrop of Sino-Soviet rivalries, both sides agreed on pressing the charge, as Bertrand Russell put it in 1963, that “the United States Government is conducting a war of annihilation in Vietnam” (quoted on 3:56). From the mid-1960s, Mao began to fear the Soviet threat more than he did the United States, and the Soviet Union replaced China as the main source of military and tactical support to Ho Chi Minh, so that Ho’s victory was ultimately a Soviet victory. But as Ben Kiernan points out in his essay “Cambodia: Detonator of Communism’s Implosion,” the Communist success in Vietnam proved to be short-lived: “The Cambodia-Vietnam conflict that began in 1977–78 signaled a final collapse of the global communist vision” (3:121). Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge shattered global perceptions of Communist revolution. The legacy of Vietnam was, according to the volume editors, “to underline the illegitimacy of violent interventions by the great powers to shape societies and politics in their own image, lessons that would reverberate into the new millennium” (3:9). Artemy M. Kalinovsky’s perceptive essay “The Soviet Union and the Global Cold War” traces the inevitable consequence of the decline in Soviet hegemony over global Communist movements—a development that profoundly transformed Moscow’s foreign policy. By the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union seemed less focused on pushing the Soviet model of modernization to the Third World, and more prone to direct military intervention in postcolonial conflicts. In their relations with Egypt, for instance, the Soviets turned a blind eye to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s good relations with the West, and even to Nasser’s persecution of Egyptian Communists (3:78). The Soviets even deceived Nasser with false intelligence regarding Israeli plans so as to provoke a war in 1967 (3:83–84, but better presented in the work of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, “The Spymaster, the Communist, and Foxbats over Dimona: The USSR’s Motive for Instigating the Six-Day War,” Israel Studies 11, no. 2 [Summer 2006]: 88–130). By the end of the 1960s, realpolitik—not Communist ideology—had become the main guide for Soviet policy: “Soviet aid was ideologically flexible . . . Just as Moscow was not interested in a wholesale export of the Soviet system, the ‘recipient’ countries were similarly intent on attracting maximum advice while preserving maximum autonomy” (3:78, 80). Besides increasing Soviet “flexibility” on ideology, there was the unavoidable reality that Third World “interest in Soviet technology declined in the 1960s and 1970s” (3:82). The truth was that Soviet technology lagged far behind the West, and this more than anything else brought a serious decline in Soviet global influence during the last decades of the twentieth century. Add to this that Moscow’s armed intervention in Ethiopia and Afghanistan had rendered the Soviet Union an international pariah, encouraging an unprecedented level of unity among Western allies and an increasing reluctance in the Third World to accept Soviet aid (3:87–88). The Cambridge History of Communism is a paradigm-changing series, one that replaces the well-worn Communist bashing typical of most previous Western studies. The collective essays are tantalizing and important. In its own way, each essay in the collection offers nuance and context that has been sorely lacking in the monolithic, one-size-fits-all treatments of earlier writers who routinely conflated Communism, totalitarianism, and violence. It turns out that the history of Communism was a living, breathing thing—not merely Moscow’s weapon for world domination, but also a pathway for Third World countries to blend anticolonialism and anti-imperialism with national struggles for independence. Like any institutionalized ideology, Communism could push for women’s equality in some parts of the world but rest comfortably with existing or “traditional” gender roles for women in parts of the world like Central Asia. Among the most fascinating discoveries, regularly appearing in essay after essay, are the ways in which Communism—an intrinsically antinationalist program—was often transformed into a nationalist ideology, one that rarely resembled the original visions of either Lenin or Stalin. Any legitimate history of Communism must be able to account for such polarities. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith, editors. The Cambridge History of Communism. Volume 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917–1941; Norman Naimark, Silvio Pons, and Sophie Quinn-Judge, editors. The Cambridge History of Communism. Volume 2: The Socialist Camp and World Power, 1941–1960s; Juliane Fürst, Silvio Pons, and Mark Selden, editors. The Cambridge History of Communism. Volume 3: Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz214
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/silvio-pons-and-stephen-a-smith-editors-the-cambridge-history-of-1TR4MhaaKp
SP - 595
VL - 124
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -