Cracking open our Times Literary Supplement last evening, we came straight on an advertisement announcing the 2003 Balzan Prizes. One of the more prestigious international awards — a sort of Nobel Prize for achievement in the sciences and humanities — the Balzans have regularly rewarded solid scholarship; a short list of eminent winners includes the medievalist R.W. Southern, the literary critic Marc Fumaroli, the sociologist Edward Shils, the philosopher Josef Pieper, and the zoologist Ernst Mayr.

It was therefore shocking to discover that the 2003 prize for achievement in “European History since 1900” has gone to Eric Hobsbawm. We would have thought that it had long since been established that Mr. Hobsbawm was not any sort of historian but rather an apologist for Stalinism. The Balzan judges even acknowledge this fact in their citation: “Eric Hobsbawm has been drawn to the History of Europe throughout his entire scholarly career, which began in the 1950s — the golden age of Communism – of which he was and, to a certain extent, still is, a partisan, as his latest works show.”

That “still is” is a wonderfully coy way of pointing out that Mr. Hobsbawm still feels an unapologetic fondness for Stalin’s rule of Russia. In a 1994 interview he was asked if knowing about the tens of millions of deaths in Soviet Russia in the 1930s might have changed his commitment to Communism. His reply: “If I were to give you a retrospective answer, which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, ‘Probably not.'”

Reviewing the already much-lauded Communist’s memoirs this summer, our own Adam Kirsch cited one particular passage where Mr. Hobsbawm admitted how little he cared for historical truth. “If one was a serious Soviet historian the best thing was to stick to the history of the ancient East and the Middle Ages. … I myself became essentially a nineteenth-century historian, because I soon discovered … that, given the strong official party and Soviet views about the twentieth century, one could not write about anything later than 1917 without the likelihood of being denounced as a political heretic.” Mr. Hobsbawm is unashamed that throughout his career he was a Party member first and a historian second. As Mr. Kirsch noted, “no principled historian could be a Party member, since history is the pursuit of truth and the Party was built on and demanded lies.”

How the Balzan judges could cite Mr. Hobsbawm’s corrupt work for its “brilliant analysis of the troubled history of twentieth-century Europe” is beyond us. Mr. Hobsbawm slavish devotion to the ever-shifting line from Moscow disqualifies him from consideration as a historian. That the Balzan judges rewarded such work ahead of the historical work of scholars Robert Conquest, Donald Kagan, Theodore Zeldin, John Lukacs, etc. is absurd. That the prize — $738,000 — will be awarded at a ceremony on November 7 in the Chamber of the Swiss National Council at Berne, Switzerland, is a mark against the Swiss. And that the prize is in the name of the late journalist and part-owner of the Corriere della Sera, Eugenio Balzan, tarnishes his memory.