When the editors of Slavic Review invited me to review this truly monumental three-volume historical undertaking, I did not realize what a daunting task I had taken upon myself. We deal here with scholarship at its very best, a thrilling kaleidoscopic perspective on a multi-faceted, immensely complex series of phenomena that we can gather under the compelling label “rise and fall of communism.” It so happens that this is the title of an upper level undergraduate seminar I have been teaching for years. The structure and the bibliography of my course converges with the underlying philosophy of these comprehensively enriching books. The architecture of the series is admirable. Each chapter synthesizes the topic under scrutiny and concludes with a short essay recommending further readings. Political history fuses with cultural and social history. Furthermore, the effort is to grasp the meanings of the communist experiment and to highlight the role of violence and repression, but also to explain the appeals of the Leninist secular political religion and the willing regimentation of millions in communist utopian exploits. The individual chapters scrutinize the appalling effects of Leninist projects in the USSR, eastern Europe, China, and other countries, but these three volumes are not a new “Black Book of Communism,” that is, an investigation of terror, purges, mass crimes, and genocidal onslaughts on whole human groups.
As it stands, this is rather a most welcome companion to the “Dictionary of 20th Century Communism” edited by Silvio Pons and Robert Service (Princeton, 2010), providing much more information and deepening many of the arguments made by the contributors to that outstanding book. The challenge is to offer a balanced and rigorous perspective on more than a century-long search for a perfect, classless, egalitarian society. The issue is how and why did the communist utopia fail? What were the intrinsic factors which led to the downfall? Can communism be reformed without breaking with Lenin's revolutionary obsessions? The ideological goals turned out to be impossible revolutionary ambitions. More than anything else, communism (in its Marxist, later Leninist incarnations) pledged to bring about an earthly Paradise. From Lenin's exaltation of the “dictatorship of workers and peasants” to Stalin's revolution from above and to Mao's Cultural Revolution (masterfully examined by Andrew Walder in vol. II), the telos was the formation of a New Man. In other words, communism was driven by a revolutionary anthropological teleology. The vanguard party was, of course, the vehicle for carrying out such an extraordinary achievement, the leap from their valley of tears into the Kingdom of Freedom.
First, the structure: Chronology merges logically with the conceptual framework, making the volumes reader-friendly, informative, and provocative. Volume 1, edited by Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith, deals with the fate of Marxism in Russia, the emergence and dynamics of Bolshevism, the role of major historical personalities (Lenin, Stalin, Trotskii), but avoids the pitfall of Russocentrism. Communism was a planetary phenomenon and its initial limitation to one country (admittedly a huge one) was a historical contingency, not a teleological choice. This view is shared by Robert Service, who writes about Lenin as historical personality; James Harris, who focuses on Stalin; and Bertrand M. Patenaude who deals with Trotskii and Trotskyism. These three chapters are historical and psychological gems, in-depth analyses based on classic and recent archival materials, as well as other scholarly contributions. Lenin appears, for good reasons, as the main architect of the fateful revolutionary invention that was the Bolshevik ideocratic tyranny. As Robert Service aptly puts it:
Without Lenin, the Bolshevik party's strategy in 1917 would have been more diffuse and indeterminate. Without Lenin, the revolution against the Provisional Government might have culminated in an all-social coalition government. Without Lenin, the decisions to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk or to initiate the NEP would not have been sanctioned. Without Lenin, there might not have been a Communist International. Without Lenin, the entire philosophical underpinning, terror, ideological certitude and amoralism would have lacked clarity and incisiveness. He was a maker of the twentieth century (vol. I, 133).
Lars T. Lih places Bolshevism within the convulsive post-World War I international context and discusses the loss of expansionist fervor as the expectations for a global social upheaval died down. Focusing on Stalin, James Harris links the Great Terror to the leader's obsession with a domestic “fifth column: “Stalin concentrated political power and lashed out in defense of the revolution. The consequences were appalling, and utterly counterproductive both for Soviet power and for its defensive capabilities. Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin or others may well have acted differently, but Stalin's authoritarianism and propensity to violence had deep roots in Bolshevism” (I: 186). In fact, as Stephen Kotkin has convincingly argued in the second volume of his superb Stalin biography, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941, Stalin saw himself as the embodiment of Soviet power and consequently any attack on him, any doubt about his omnipotence and omniscience, amounted to an attempt to destroy Lenin's legacies. This exalted self-image explains Stalin's uncompromising will to liquidate any real or potential enemies. As for Trotskii, his biographer Bertrand M. Patenaude reminds us of his role in the ruthless military suppression of the Kronshtadt sailors’ revolt in March 1921: “Now they were demanding genuine elections to the soviets, the cessation of political terror and the kind of free trade the Bolsheviks were about to introduce. A special target of their wrath was bloody ‘Field Marshal Trotsky’” (I: 198). The chapter ends with a bitterly ironic reflection on the pathetic fate of Trotskii's ideas, summed up by the late Christopher Hitchens (once a Trotskyite himself): “Even for educated readers, Leon Trotsky survives as part kitsch and part caricature” (I: 210). In other words, “Long Love Trotskii” has become a ludicrously hollow, meaningless slogan. I would add that this semantic dissolution, the extinction of the communist utopian energy, applies to all the genres of the species investigated in these volumes. We deal with what the late Robert C. Tucker called the de-radicalization of Marxist regimes. More precisely, we encounter the poverty of utopia, its decline, attrition, exhaustion, and breakdown.
Both the rise and the fall of communism cannot be understood without linking the local experiences to the Moscow Center, the sacred heart of world revolution, and the impact of Soviet decisions on Leninist parties from Shanghai to Paris, from Prague to Mexico City. In other words, only transnational history, so impressively illustrated by this series, can do justice to the transnational, trans-continental, meta-historical internationalist project. Kevin Morgan accurately concludes his gripping chapter on the cult of the individual with this seminal behest:
As sometime martyrs and party tribunes were installed in power, the singularity and complexity of international communism was not just the interlocking of such figures within a movement of unprecedented cohesion, but the encompassing over time of multiple transitions from one such figure to another. The challenge of a transnational communist history is to try to develop a conceptual apparatus which is at once rigorous and flexible enough to accommodate them (I: 570).
I think that this volume would have benefitted from a discussion of what Daniel Bell once called the succession of Kronshtadts, that is, the series of major testimonies about the Stalinist crimes and follies, and the role of apostates, primarily someone like Arthur Koestler, in debunking the contagious, spellbinding communist pretense. The history of communism in the twentieth century was as much one of conversion and of de-conversion, of ideological ecstasy and anti-ideological rebellion. In a way, Rosa Luxemburg was perhaps the first major anti-Leninist voice coming from the Marxist revolutionary Left, a point clearly made by Eric Weitz in his remarkably insightful chapter on German communism.
Volume II also contains an abundance of studies dealing with the dynamics of communism during and after the Nazi attack on the USSR in June 1941. At that moment, the Comintern was for all practical purposes a dead body. The ultimate blow had been the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939. Convincingly argued and conceptually powerful, Evan Mawdsley's essay on “World War II, Soviet Power and International Communism” highlight Stalin's designs, but understandably does not focus on the satellitization of eastern Europe and role of local communist parties in the establishment of Soviet-type regimes. This is done by one of the most astute historians of the region, Stanford's Norman Naimark. His chapter, “The Sovietization of East Central Europe 1945–1989,” is an exemplary tour de force in explaining the priorities, strategies, and allegiance of both communist elites and their critics from the early espousal of the Soviet model to the various challenges and crises of the post-Stalin era. The conclusion bears upon the enduring Leninist legacies: “The institutions and visible signs of Sovietization may be gone forever, but the mentality introduced by its programs remains even among some young people born after 1989 (II: 83). This persistence of communist mental forms combined with the resurgence of interwar anti-liberal stances is one of the causes of the ongoing neo-authoritarian wave in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Alfred Rieber offers a fascinating chapter on “Anti-Fascist Resistance Movements in Europe and Asia.” Other excellent contributions which I read with great interest and intellectual profit are Mark Kramer's “The Changing Pattern of Soviet-East European Relations, 1953–1968,” Federico Romero's “Cold War Anti-Communism and the Impact of Communism in the West,” and Pavel Kolář’s “Post-Stalinist Reformism and the Prague Spring.” It is somewhat surprising that none of the contributors mention historian François Furet's influential demystification of the anti-fascist intellectuals’ romance with Stalinism in his classic 1999 book The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. In the same vein, I would have expected references to Tony Judt's path-breaking writings on the endless fallacies of French communists and their fellow travelers.
The editors made sure that enough attention is paid to the post-Stalin efforts to restore the Leninist tradition. Jörg Baberowski's chapter “Nikita Khrushchev and De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964” is a thoroughgoing attempt to re-think Khrushchev's tormented personality and his decisive role in opening up the system, shaking its political foundation, and ending mass terror. Stalin's greatness was evil, based on vicious ruthlessness, and this ironclad tenaciousness provoked both fear and adoration. Once in power, Khrushchev never enjoyed his predecessor's cult and preferred a much more down-to-earth political style. People made fun of him and his schemes, but they could do it with impunity precisely because the changes he made managed to make the regime less inhuman:
There is a tendency in Russia to remember Stalin over the reformer—Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev—who taught the people how to laugh again. Perhaps one day, Khrushchev's de-Stalinization project will be recognized as one of the most important civilizing achievements of the twentieth century—the work of an uneducated son of a peasant turned reformer, who could not live with his guilt. “Khrushchev,” declared Akhmatova, “did the greatest possible thing for me—he gave me back my son” (II: 135).
The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Khrushchev's devastating “Secret Speech” provoked a schism within the Soviet Bloc and the world communist movement. After February 1956, the Stalinist despots everywhere felt threatened, beleaguered, and undermined. The Hungarian Revolution debunked the main underpinnings of communist certainty as blatant lies: communist regimes were not infallible. Furthermore, they were neither irreversible, nor invincible. The lessons of 1956 led in at least two directions: one was the continuous search for socialism with a human face, a reconciliation between Leninism and democracy. This approach fell apart in August 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed the Czechoslovak reform movement. The other reaction was the radical rejection of Khrushchev's onslaught on Stalin's myth. Mao Zedong was the paramount voice of those who regarded Khrushchev as the gravedigger of world socialism. In a penetrating discussion of the Cultural Revolution, Andrew G. Walder identifies the sources of the huge mass mobilization unleashed in 1966 not by the Communist Party, but against it, in Mao's extraordinary revolutionary will, unrepentant Stalinism, and millenarian fever:
The origins of the Cultural Revolution can be traced to de-Stalinization in the Soviet bloc in the mid 1950s, and in particular to Nikita Khrushchev's “Secret Speech.” . . . These changes caught China's leaders off guard, and especially Mao, who had built a personal cult of his own in imitation of Stalin's, and who had carried out a series of large repression campaigns against alleged class enemies and other “anti-party elements” after seizing power in 1949 (II: 220).
Mao's main motivation was his fear that de-Stalinization can threaten his absolute control over the Party and result in what he disliked the most: intellectual liberalization and freedom for political factions. Add to this his firm belief in his own predestined role and the paranoid suspicions regarding his closest lieutenants. This was a major difference between Stalin, who, once the Great Purge came to an end, preserved and relied upon his team, and Mao, who continuously attacked, humiliated, and persecuted his closest associates. In his subtle chapter, “Mao Zedong as a Historical Personality,” Daniel Leese shows how Mao conceived of himself as a “great man” whose mission was to create great historical accomplishments, even miracles. But he was not a traditional leader, his true objective was to immortalize his power via his ideological clout, which could outlive temporary posthumous criticisms of his extreme measures: “Mao further anticipated that, after his death, his legacy might be repudiated and vilified. Yet, he remained assured that his writings would always provide sufficient ammunition for true revolutionaries and that reactionary rule was bound to fail in the long run” (II: 285).
Both Stalin and Mao resented the Yugoslav communist strongman Josip Broz Tito. Ivo Banac's thought-provoking chapter, “Yugoslav Communism and the Yugoslav State,” revisits the origins and the implications of the 1948 schism. Banac's Tito was a hard-core Stalinist, a Cominternist committed to preserving the Party's grip on power, no matter what, despite his break with the master in the Kremlin. His revolutionary adventurism was not acceptable to the Kremlin because it could jeopardize Stalin's own geopolitical gambits: “It was Tito's radicalism rather than his supposed laxity that was the chief source of conflict with Stalin” (II: 577). In spite of its professed anti-Stalinism, Tito's version of Leninism was not anti-totalitarian. To highlight the limits of Tito's reformism, Banac quotes this telltale harsh statement by the Yugoslav leader made in 1971: “Dubček made many errors. They were hasty, and went too far, too quickly. They negated everything in the past. They allowed the press to attack the USSR fiercely” (II: 589).
The third volume dwells upon the post-1968 dissolution of the once galvanizing communist creed. Robert Gildea highlights the impact of the watershed year 1968 on world communism. Three influential west European Communist Parties—the Italian, French, and Spanish—condemned the Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia. This led to a growing distancing of these once loyal formations from the Moscow Center. The long-acclaimed unbreakable unity of the world communist movement was a shambles. Piero Gleijeses discusses the avatars of Leninism in Latin America; Ben Kiernan focuses on the Khmer Rouge disaster; James Mark places the 1989 revolutions in a global context; and Vladislav Zubok provides a necessary synthesis on the collapse of the USSR. I fully agree with his insistence on the immensely important role of Gorbachev's anti-Stalinist policies: “Gorbachev's reforms set in motion the decomposition of Soviet-style structures, and produced powerful dynamics and forces that tore the Soviet Union apart” (III: 251).
The final breakdown was the unintended result of Mikhail Gorbachev's adoption of the east European Marxist revisionist program. In a chapter dealing with reform communism, Silvio Pons and Michele di Donato define this trend “as a historical phenomenon that cannot be equated with perestroika alone, even if its historical meaning should primarily be understood in light of Gorbachev's reforms (III: 179). One of the responses to the ideological decay of Soviet Marxism was the rise of Eurocommunism. As I write this review, it is another past illusion, but in the 1970s, this project seemed to have a future.
At the end of the day, the question is: What are the legacies of the attempts to make Bolshevism a universal experience? How could the Promethean dream to liberate humanity from alienation, domination, and exploitation transform itself into nightmarish experiments exerted upon millions of human beings? Can Sovietism return? Jan C. Behrends disturbingly writes: “With Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 the re-Sovietization of political culture gained new momentum. Political repression against real or imagined oppositionists, restrictions on civil society and censorship of the media increased” (III: 574). The series concludes with a poignantly sobering essay by Harvard's historian Charles S. Maier:
Authoritarianism without a mass party has recovered in Russia. And even in countries earlier designated as “the West” the question arises whether, even without a credible communist threat, fascist-like appeals might not revive as a political alternative that confronts democracies by recession and prone to inequality. The enduring power of market capitalism to perpetuate liberal democracy, growth and affluence may yet be tested again” (III: 616).
The time of Bolshevism has certainly expired. Radical egalitarian utopias have failed like a castle of cards. While paying tribute to Marx and Mao, Chinese communists practice the oxymoronic policies of market Leninism. Communism, in the sense discussed in this imposing three volumes, died because of the insoluble tensions which it tried to solve, regardless of human sacrifices, traumas, and social pain. At the very core of this eschatological project was the conviction that history has an inner logic, one destination, and one meaning. One hundred years of communist experiments have proved that history is not logical, it does not have a destination, and it depends on us to assess its many meanings.
