Chronicle of a Dreadful Era

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The New York Sun

A critical fact of the 20th century is that, while Hitler died holed up in a bunker, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao died in bed. Justice, at least in this world, was denied their untold millions of victims. Unlike the Germans, the Russians and Chinese never suffered occupation and partition as a consequence of the monumental crimes committed in their name. There remains in both countries a vast reservoir of sympathy for the ends, if not the means, of the communists.


This vastly complicates the recovery process in Russia, as it will in China, when the communists finally give way to new leaders. It makes breaking with the past a much more nuanced and incomplete affair. Moral confusion contributes to the instability that makes these states a continuing threat to themselves and their neighbors.


The historian’s role in documenting the past becomes even more important when faced with such underlying ambiguity, and there is a growing body of work that is setting the record straight, particularly on the former Soviet Union. With access to archival information previously unavailable and a steady accumulation of eyewitness accounts, a more complete picture has emerged on the nature of the regimes and extent of the crimes. The most devastating recent account is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, but the groundbreaking work of Harvey Klehr and John Earle Haynes in “The Secret World of American Communism” and Herbert Romerstein’s and the late Eric Breindel’s “The Venona Secrets” paint a much clearer picture of Soviet crimes and ambitions.


What has been less in evidence is a popular and accessible history aimed at the average reader. This is what the veteran British journalist and former member of Parliament Robert Harvey attempts with “A Short History of Communism” (Thomas Dunne, 480 pages, $29.95).


This is an ambitious book that deserves a broad readership. It is unflinching and persuasive in its overall presentation of communism as an obstacle, rather than a vehicle, for development in even the most primitive economies. (One of the most frequently heard apologies on the left is that communism jump-started industrialization in backward Russia and China.) Mr. Harvey is also completely unsentimental in his treatment of the utopian idealists who brought devastation wherever they managed to seize power. As for the evil trio who created the most suffering, Mr. Harvey makes clear that they were principally animated by a common lust for power.


Mr. Harvey has a talent for character and narrative. He is able to draw distinctive portraits of his subjects, from Mao as the dreamy young poet on the make, to Stalin in his final years: a pock-marked paranoid devouring enemies and friends. In the chapter on Mao, he describes the young dictator-to-be:


“A tall, gangling, dreamy impractical youth with a faraway look in his eyes, he enjoyed poetry and… his deliberate, deeply serious and softly spoken manner … made him appear somewhat languid and effeminate.”


The poet would later become the butcher, whose favorite maxim held that political power “grows out of the barrel of a gun.”


The minor characters, from Cuba’s Castro to Yugoslavia’s Tito, are all equally well-handled. Lenin, often portrayed as an idealist whose legacy was perverted and finally destroyed by Stalin, is rendered convincingly here as the power-mad inventor of mass terror. It is a well paced narrative, nimbly shifting from the earliest days of the Soviets to the bloody Maoist experiments and from the plight of the captive nations in Eastern Europe to the Marxist adventures, indigenous and exported, throughout the Third World.


One of Mr. Harvey’s salient points is how close the world actually came to communist domination. He provides a fascinating map of the world, circa 1980, that is a snapshot of the movement at high tide. The map not only shows the vastness of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and Indo-China, but it is also a reminder that much of Africa and Latin America was either a one-party socialist state or fighting a significant communist guerrilla movement. It also shows France, Italy, and Spain with large communist electoral parties.


The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the massive subsequent arms buildup by the United States, the election of a Polish pope, and the early stirrings of civil disobedience in Eastern Europe helped put an end to communist expansion and, ultimately, led to its virtual collapse as worldwide political force.


This “Short History” has its quirks. For example, Mr. Harvey has a blindspot when it comes to Nikita Krushchev, whom he obviously admires. Recent scholarship suggests that Mr. Krushchev had much bloodier hands than the Krushchev memoirs and other earlier accounts indicated, but they are not represented here. There is a faint, and very English, condescension in his discussion of communist infiltration of U.S. institutions during the 1950s. Mr. Harvey has obviously has spent too much time with American news accounts and not enough with the Venona decodes and the incriminating Soviet documents from that period.


Nevertheless, “A Short History of Communism” is a worthwhile contribution to the political literature. It is a concise and reliable summary of a dreadful time.



Mr. Willcox last wrote for these pages on the future of the European Union.


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