The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown

From the Publisher

From the internationally acclaimed Oxford authority on Communism comes a definitive history that examines the origins of the ideology, its development in different nations, its collapse in many of those countries following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. The Rise and Fall of Communism explores how and why Communists came to power; how they were able, in a variety of countries on different continents, to hold on to power for so long; and what brought about the downfall of so many Communist systems.

For this comprehensive and illuminating work, Brown draws on more than forty years of research and on a wealth of new sources. Tracing the story of Communism from its nineteenth-century roots, Brown explains both its expansion and its decline in the twentieth century. Even today, although Communism has been widely discredited in the West, more than a fifth of humanity still lives under its rule.

Ed Goedeken - Library Journal

Since the days of Marx and Engels, scholars have been writing about communism and what it means to contemporary society. For the past 30 years Brown (politics, emeritus, Oxford Univ.) has devoted his considerable energies to explaining various aspects of the history of communism, especially in the Soviet Union. His 1996 study, The Gorbachev Factor, and his more recent Seven Years That Changed the World are two essential works from the more than a dozen books he has authored. Although his new book compares topically with Robert Harvey's A Short History of Communism and Robert Service's Comrades!: A History of World Communism, Brown's particular strength is his profound knowledge and understanding of the 1980s, when Gorbachev took power and initiated the reform agenda that led (although this was not his intention) to the collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and freedom for Eastern Europe. Brown's study also treats China, Cuba, and other Communist countries, but his analysis is especially impressive for the Soviet Union. A seminal work from a distinguished scholar; highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews

Essential history of a multifaceted political movement that ended in tears in many places-but endures in many others. There are few people more qualified than Brown (Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, 2007, etc.) to write authoritatively on the communist states of the world; during a 40-year career he has studied in most of the principal powers. Many of them, he notes, are no longer communist. The remaining five-China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam-are more different than alike in critical respects of governance. Brown charts the origins of communism to pre-Marxist millenarianism. With the work of Marx and Engels the doctrine solidified and codified, though it would be transformed in the hands of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao Zedong. The author notes Trotsky's famous observation that in Russia, the process of party substitutionism-whereby the party stood in for the working class, the central committee for the party and the head of the central committee for the committee itself-would inevitably lead to dictatorship. So it did, with Stalin's police arresting nearly 1.7 million Soviet citizens in 1937-38 alone, executing at least 818,000 of them. Communists are as famous as any other ideologues for intramural squabbles, as Brown observes, such that many refuse to acknowledge that communism has ever held power-since " ‘communism' was to be the ultimate stage of socialism which they never claimed to have reached"-and many others claim to have the lock on the true form of the doctrine (think Kim Jong Il). Brown's analysis of these various strains of belief is spot-on, but the best part of the book comes at the close, when he undertakes a nearly blow-by-blowaccount of the end of the Soviet regime behind the closed doors of the Kremlin, the subsequent fall of a dozen communist states and a host of unintended consequences-including the reunification of Germany, which "the most committed opponents of the regime in East Germany, including those who led the demonstrations in October 1989," had not really wanted. Historical writing and political analysis of the highest order.

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The Rise and Fall of Communism

Chapter One

The Idea of Communism

'A spectre is haunting Europe ... the spectre of communism.' When Karl Marx began his Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 with these famous words, he ... and his co-author, Friedrich Engels ... could have had no inkling of the way in which Communism would take off in the twentieth century. It became not merely a spectre but a living reality. And not just in Europe, but for hundreds of millions of people spread across the globe ... in places very different from those where Marx expected proletarian revolutions to occur. Communist systems were established in two predominantly peasant societies ... the largest country in the world, Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union, and in the state with the largest population, China. Why and how Communism spread, what kind of system it became, how it varied over time and across space, and why and how it came to an end in Europe, where it began, are the central themes of this book.

Marx's claim was an exaggeration when he made it in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century it had become almost an understatement. That is not to say that the 'Communism' which held sway in so many countries bore much resemblance to anything Marx had envisaged. There was a wide gulf between the original theory and the subsequent practice of Communist rule. Karl Marx sincerely believed that under communism ... the future society of his imagination which he saw as an inevitable, and ultimate, stage of human development ... people would live more freely than ever before. Yet 'his vision of the universal liberation ofhumankind' did not include any safeguards for individual liberty.1 Marx would have hated to be described as a moralist, since he saw himself as a Communist who was elaborating a theory of scientific socialism. Yet many of his formulations were nothing like as 'scientific' as he made out. One of his most rigorous critics on that account, Karl Popper, pays tribute to the moral basis of much of Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century capitalism. As Popper observes, under the slogan of 'equal and free competition for all', child labour in conditions of immense suffering had been 'tolerated, and sometimes even defended, not only by professional economists but also by churchmen'. Accordingly, 'Marx's burning protest against these crimes', says Popper, 'will secure him forever a place among the liberators of mankind.'2 Those who took power in the twentieth century, both using and misusing Marx's ideas, turned out, however, to be anything but liberators. Marxist theory, as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently refashioned by Josif Stalin in Russia and by Mao Zedong in China, became a rationalization for ruthless single-party dictatorship.

During most of the twentieth century Communism was the world's dominant international political movement. People reacted to it in different ways ... as a source of hope for a radiant future or as the greatest threat on the face of the earth. By the middle decades of the last century there were Communist governments not only in a string of Soviet satellite states in Europe but also in Latin America and Asia. Communism held sway in what became the 'Second World'. The 'First World' ... headed by the United States and its main European allies ... was to engage in prolonged struggle with the international Communist movement for influence in the 'Third World'.

Even in countries with strong democratic traditions, among them the United States and Great Britain, many intellectuals were drawn for a time to Communism. In France and Italy, in particular, Communist parties became significant political forces ... far stronger than they were in Britain and America. The French and Italian parties had substantial popular as well as intellectual support, together with significant parliamentary representation. After Communist systems had been put in place not just in Eastern Europe and Asia but in Cuba, too, it seemed to some at one point as if the system would triumph also in Africa. The global rivalry between the West and the Communist bloc led to prolonged tension and the Cold War. At times that came close to 'hot war' ... most notably during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The rise of Communism, even more than the rise of fascism, was the most important political phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. For Communism turned out to be a much stronger, and longer-lasting, movement ... and political religion ... than fascism. That is why by far the most significant political event of the later part of the century was the end of Communism in Europe ... and its effective demise as an international movement. The decline, which preceded the fall, occurred over several decades, even though these were highly contradictory years which saw also Communist advances. It was after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had exposed some of the crimes of Stalin in 1956 that Communism had its singular success on the American continent ... in Cuba ... and that its Asian reach expanded to embrace the whole of Vietnam.

It is worth noting at the outset that Communist parties did not call their own systems 'Communist' but, rather, 'socialist'. For them, 'communism' was to be a later stage in the development of society ... the ultimate stage ... in which the institutions of the state would have 'withered away' and would have been replaced by a harmonious, self-administering society. Throughout the book ... to reiterate an important distinction ... I use 'commun-ism' when referring to that fanciful future utopia (and 'communism' also for other non-Marxist utopias), but 'Communism', with a capital 'C', when discussing actual Communist systems.