Starred review from September 14, 2009
Priestland, a lecturer in modern history at Oxford, delivers almost 700 pages of stormy history, but the pace never flags. Underlying the narrative is a nuanced understanding of communism as an ideology that took on different forms (romantic, radical, modernist) depending on local and historical context. But all were inherently unstable. According to Priestland, the Jacobins of the French Revolution planted the seeds of modern communism. They claimed to be building a modern state on principles of true, universal equality while treating those who disagreed as enemies of equality. In the following century, Marx proclaimed communism's scientific basis and the inevitability of global revolution. The 1917 Russian revolution caught everyone's attention, but despite universalist rhetoric, Soviet Communism became nationalistic and technocratic. This violated Marxist principles, but appealed to poor, rural nations after WWII. From Russia, Priestland moves to Latin America, Cuba and Africa, covering Communist guerrilla uprisings and urban terror, and the eventual lagging of economic development in the Soviet empire and China. The former collapsed and the latter has discarded Marxist ideology. Detailed and scholarly but written in lively prose, this is a rich, satisfying account of the most successful utopian political movement in history.
October 15, 2009
Reviewing the failure of Communist regimes, Priestland recurs throughout to a basic cause: their inability to win allegiance from the populations they governed. As in Robert Services Comrades! A History of World Communism (2007), the opposition that Communists encountered when in power guides Priestlands narrative; he also stresses the importance of ideology in shaping Communists policies to create the egalitarian utopia of their Marxist dreams. In broad terms, Priestland distinguishes two varieties of twentieth-century Communists: romantic, agitprop radicals, and command-and-control modernizers. The doctrinal and power disputes within every Communist Party that seized the state ramified throughout the country it ruled, from Russia to Cuba, affecting the scale of repressions and, on the other hand, the degree of loyalty accorded to the regime. Bringing synthesis to a historical topic riven with specialization, Priestland comprehensively covers communisms roots in nineteenth-century critiques of capitalism, Leninists and Maoists attacks on markets and campaigns to forge socialist consciousness, and the eventual enervation of Communist enthusiasm that prefigured the revolutions of 1989. An impressively knowledgeable overview of communisms Promethean ambition to perfect humanity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)