HISTORY
When all else fails

ODD ARNE WESTAD
Archie Brown
THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMUNISM
736pp. The Bodley Head. £25.
978 022407879 5
US: Ecco. $35.99. 978 0061138799

The reconstituted Communist Party of the Russian Federation declared in October 2008 that it would not criticize the government in public, since to do so "would only harm the market and the anti-crisis programme". However, there are plenty of revolutionary groups worldwide that would like to destroy capitalism. Whether they will gain much of a following depends on how the current financial crisis unfolds. But believing that Communism is a thing of the past is itself now a thing of the past.
Archie Brown, the doyen of British experts on Russia, presents in his new book a dispassionate and highly useful overview of the history of Communism from medieval peasants' revolts to twenty-first-century China. The collapse of the Soviet Union has, as Brown notes, meant deep crisis for movements worldwide that associated themselves with it in one form or another. But Brown is also aware of the frequency with which Communism has been written off only to reappear. He sees that the transformation that many Communist states and parties outside Europe have been forced to effect has probably made them more durable and more adaptable to changes in circumstance. The big question is whether this adaptability will bring about the transmutation of their ideologies, away from Marxism and towards the market, as has already happened in China.
As a historian of Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union and the remarkable changes I that took place there during six years of perestroika and glasnost, Brown is well placed to discuss such developments. He was more than an observer of those events. His insistence to Margaret Thatcher in 1983 that the possibility of Gorbachev's accession to the post of General Secretary represented the most "hopeful choice from the point of view of both Soviet citizens and the outside world" led to Gorbachev's famous meeting with the Prime Minister at Chequers in December 1984.
Brown is particularly good at explaining how the global appeal of Communism after 1945 came directly out of people's experience of two world wars and the Depression. If liberal democracy, capitalism and the markets had been seen to be working, Communism would have not stood a chance of attracting broad support. Instead, the promise of social justice and equality offered by the Soviet Union, even with Stalin in charge, appeared to some to augur a better future than the systems represented by the United States and Britain. Communism fed off the spectacular inability of these countries to prevent war and socio-economic chaos. As Brown rightly points out, there is no limit to what people are willing to believe in when all else seems to have failed.
In the first post-war decade, the Soviet Union and its allies presented the greatest challenge to the Western-dominated international system in 300 years. Not since the heyday of the Ottoman Empire had a mightier force been enlisted against the main European powers. In people's perceptions, especially in Europe and East Asia, the formation of a Sino-Soviet alliance was a sign of things to come, joining the largest and most resource-rich country on earth to the country with the largest population. Looking back from the early twenty-first century, it may be difficult to see how any of these events could have been construed as having greater import than the spectacular rise in wealth and power of the United States. But then history is often read backwards. Growing US predominance counted for less in the minds of many simply because it was not seen as a clean break with the past.
By the end of the following decade, the challengers had thrown it all away. The Sino Soviet alliance had been replaced by deep enmity. The Soviet economy was developing more slowly than that of the West, and the real success stories were not of collective farms and enterprises, but of East Asian economies that had opted for capitalism. Brown is undoubtedly right that it was the willingness of Western leaders to incorporate an unprecedentedly high level of social security into their capitalist economies that did most to expose Soviet-style Communism for what it was: oppressive, ineffective - and extremely boring. But the Communists themselves did a stellar job of discrediting Communism through their own discord and incompetence.
Given his earlier work, it is no surprise that Brown spends a good quarter of the book discussing Communism's collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While not adding much to his earlier treatments of the subject, he provides an excellent summary, not least through his emphasis on how internal contradictions within Soviet Communism proved fatal, while internal contradictions within the West were successfully dealt with (at least for a while). The two are intimately connected. It was the image of Western success and Soviet failure that forced Gorbachev to undo the system he inherited in 1985.
There is still much we do not understand about exactly how Soviet Communism collapsed. The gradual acceptance within Gorbachev's closest circle of Western ideas about democracy and international cooperation obviously played a big part, as did images of Western abundance and productivity. Gorbachev wanted to make his country part of that international system which it had been created to oppose. He dreamt of a new Soviet Union guided by socialism "with a human face"; a Soviet Union capable of forming a partnership with the United States to manage an unruly world. But the contradictions soon became too stark. I remember talking to one Soviet emissary who had been sent on Gorbachev's behalf to lecture the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu on the need for democracy and reforms, and who concluded that Africa did not suffer from capitalism, but from a lack of capitalism. Meanwhile, Soviet and East European officials were defecting en masse from state ideology, creating what one described as a "traffic jam on the road to Damascus". Even Gorbachev was caught in the quandary of lecturing to others about the need for democracy while his own country had nothing of the sort.
The way the Soviet Union fell apart prompts the question of why it survived as long as it did - and why some Communist states continue to exist today. Brown's analysis of the Communist model (squeezed somewhat awkwardly into a separate chapter in the middle of his historical survey) lists six essential features: the Communist Party's monopoly on power, democratic centralism, non-capitalist ownership of the means of production, a command economy, the declared aim of building communism, and internationalism. It is doubtful, however, whether any polity ever combined all these features at any one time. As political movements, Communist parties were always hybrid: Stalin's Soviet Union was the prisoner of Russia's tsarist past, just as Mao's China was fuelled by two generations of anger against Western incursions. Various forms of nationalism were never far from the minds of the leaders of the world proletariat, threatening to drown them ideologically like "flies in milk", as Lenin put it in 1922. Gorbachev's Soviet Union, and even Brezhnev's, had come a long way since the October Revolution, and distinct categorizations are less helpful than the study of variance and adaptability in explaining that evolution.
One reason why people became Communist and stayed that way, even when Communism had ceased appealing to their intellects, is the conservative aspect of its anti-capitalism. If we lift our gaze from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe towards the Third World, it soon becomes clear that many Communists saw themselves as defending their communities against an onslaught of market values which they neither understood nor respected. Marx's ideal man could easily be presented as a defender of local concepts of morality and justice as they came under threat from the steamroller of capitalist development. It is this righteous aspect of Communism that helped some parties and states survive the 1990s. None of them fits comfortably within Brown's typology, but they continue to draw from the arsenal of analyses and images that Communism provides.
China, the largest of the surviving Communist states, is, as Brown notes, a hybrid system. During its sixty years of existence, it has mutated from a particularly intense Stalinist Puritanism to an almost orgiastic embrace of market mechanisms. Still, at its core stands a fully functional Communist Party, whose cells form a parallel structure of power at every workplace and inside every bureaucracy. Many Westerners who glimpse it feel as if they are watching one of those science fiction films in which an apparently normal human being is opened to reveal a monstrous alien inside. The Chinese Communist Party has retained its grip on power by reinventing itself, after 1989, as a symbol of nationalism and economic growth. But not all of its leaders understand that the two are connected; that it is only as long as they deliver spectacular prosperity that their political system will be tolerated by the population. To many young Chinese, the way their country is ruled is something of an embarrassment. But the vague idea that the system is somehow related to extraordinary economic success can help fuel nationalist pride in even the most dysfunctional form of government.
The main reason to read this splendid book is not its political science but its history, and what its narrative may tell us about the future. Brown, a Scottish empiricist if there ever was one, believes that history matters deeply, but not that it determines the shape of things to come. Rather, as his eclectic account shows, we must attempt to understand the reasons why people react to events the way they do, even if we know that it is often the outliers and the exceptions that point towards the longer term. What sets Archie Brown's volume apart from other books on the history of world Communism, including a major study by his fellow member of St Antony's College, Oxford, Robert Service (reviewed in the TLS, October 12, 2007), is his willingness to grasp people's motivations, even if they are of the sort with which the author himself profoundly disagrees. 

TLS 21 & 28 August 2009