Silvio Pons has written a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and very useful book on the development and demise of international communism. Starting with the birth of Leninism in 1903, it traces the fate of Russian-oriented communism up to the collapse of 1991. The figure of Stalin looms large throughout the account. For Pons, very quickly after the October Revolution – in some respects in a matter of months – Bolshevism turned away from democracy and fused with the state to defend itself from capitalist onslaught and to organize its own counter-offensive. In the author’s words, ‘The Soviet state became the cohesive factor in the communist movement’ (p. 15). In this way, starting with Brest-Litovsk, defence of Soviet state interest was the first requirement of the communist wherever she or he found her- or himself. Quite correctly, Pons emphasizes that this does not equate to abandoning ‘world revolution’ in favour of socialism in one country. It was, he argues convincingly, a viable revolutionary strategy and ‘a political faith’ (p. 48).

The whole of Pons’s account is an extended meditation and analysis based on this idea. There are some fine perceptions along the way. He quotes Brecht’s view that it was necessary to be merciless to open the way to the visionary future and concludes that this was the model for generations of communists. It was certainly a key insight about Stalin and Stalinism and helps link the contradictory horrors and achievements so typical of that movement. Pons berates Trotsky for claiming that Stalin had abandoned world revolution in the 1930s (p. 66) and has an excellent reading of Stalin’s complicated attitude in the same decade to the civil war, proposing some interesting links with Soviet internal policies, notably the Great Terror. Stalin is castigated in conventional terms for being bamboozled by Hitler through the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact and for failing to see the invasion date in 1941. In a much more ambiguous sequence, he is also blamed for starting the Cold War and dividing Europe up, even though Pons himself gives numerous examples of Stalin’s preference for universalism and attempted experiments with ‘people’s democracies’ of one kind or another. Interestingly, the author does not consider the Finnish case at any point in this discussion, so the notion that ‘Finlandization’ might have been possible more widely does not appear. It is rather confusing that Pons argues that Stalin favoured ‘spheres of influence’ but that he ‘was not interested in dividing Europe’ (p. 131), and that there was no plan for the Sovietization of Eastern Europe (p. 146).

The period after Stalin’s death is more or less seen as a continuous crisis arising from the fact that the Stalinist system was ‘unreformable’ and that, in a way very reminiscent of today, it was not clear whether the USSR was ‘powerful and stable or intrinsically vulnerable’ (p. 201). The complex post-1956 era is covered well but selectively, with discussions of Poland and Cuba and an excellent account of the Sino-Soviet split as stand-out areas. The persistence of ideology in this era is emphasized, especially at the time of the 1956–61 crisis, which saw several secret conferences of international communist parties thrashing out principles. Pons puts the key emphasis on ideology in the split with China, including Mao’s gung-ho assertion that a thermonuclear war would destroy capitalism but not socialism. The idea that ideology was important leads to an uneasy line of argument through the Brezhnev years, by which time, arguably, ideology was dead. But the irony that, under Brezhnev, who minimized the role of ideology, the Soviet Union achieved ‘superpower’ status at the same time as it lost its inner purpose is not fully brought out. Although Pons’s discourse is essentially one of crisis and decline, it overlooks the fact that the widest extent of the USSR’s influence continued as late as 1979, after the collapse of European fascism had led to the rise of Eurocommunism and socialist revolutions in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, of which only Angola holds Pons’s attention. In those years, Henry Kissinger believed that the United States was losing the global struggle.

Indeed, one might say that the emphasis on the Soviet state in Pons’s account means that the title of the book is misleading. One might have put ideology as the most powerful glue of the communist movement from the outset and built on the excellent insights of the opening paragraphs that communism was diverse, culturally conditioned by the home countries of the respective parties, and attracted intellectuals and artists for a variety of reasons. This would lead to a view of communism more as a faith group than anything else. Pons puts organization in first place from the beginning, which leads him first to overemphasize the degree of discipline in Lenin’s party before and after October 1917, and, second, by situating this organizational dimension in the Soviet state, to see Chinese communism as a derivative and to pay insufficient attention to the sources of ‘heretical’ segments of the movement associated with Tito, Castro, Guevara, and others, including the Trotskyite strand.

The result is not really a history of global communism, as the title proclaims, but a very good account of the international aspirations of successive Soviet governments and their allies in the communist movement. Strangely, there is no reference to the pioneering work in this field of Julius Braunthal. There is also a tendency to see changes in international policy directions leading to internal Soviet changes – perhaps most controversially that the purges ended in 1938 as a response to the Munich agreement (pp. 90–1) – when most analysts would say that it was the developing internal stages which led to changes of international policy. To sum up, this is a valuable account with some very insightful high spots, though it does have a somewhat misleading title.