The un-American way of life

A controversial new history of Communism suggests that most everything we think we know about it is wrong

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jul 3, 2009 |

Most adults now living were born during the Cold War, a 45-year standoff between competing political and economic systems that threatened civilization with nuclear annihilation and asked virtually every human being on earth to pick a side. One of those systems was called Communism, and it cast such a long, dark shadow across the 20th century that it's amazing to reflect how thoroughly it has vanished from the scene and how poorly its history is understood.

Genuine support for Communism -- meaning the Marxist-Leninist governing ideology of the Soviet Union and its allies, as distinct from various flavors of socialism or social democracy -- was minimal in the Western world, despite the United States government's best efforts to uncover it. But you didn't have to endorse Communism to be fascinated by it. Simply the existence of that alternate model, with its claim of scientific inevitability and its alleged utopian aims, had a bizarre, distorting effect on political discourse clear across the ideological spectrum.

Significant sectors of the left were paralyzed by Communism, unwilling or unable to criticize regimes (no matter how nightmarish and autocratic) that nominated themselves as the enemies of capitalism and imperialism and the champions of third-world revolution. Right-wingers became hysterically obsessed by it, finding a creeping Red stain in Hollywood movies, pop music and abstract art (and never realizing how much they were mirroring the paranoia of the Soviet commissars). Eager to prove they weren't closet pinkos, the mainstream liberals of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations launched a disastrous series of overt and covert anti-Communist proxy wars, whose echoes continue to reverberate today. (Osama bin Laden, after all, was a nasty little piece of Cold War blowback.)

Academics pumped out scholarly treatises on the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism by the yard, and debated the Soviet system's merits and flaws feverishly. Now all those copies of "The Lenin Anthology" and Leszek Kolakowski's "Main Currents in Marxism" are moldering in the garages of former grad students, and our collective memory of the great 20th-century struggle between capitalism and Communism is a series of clichés and blurry newsreel images: Stalin and FDR guffawing as they carve up the postwar world, Kennedy and Khrushchev daring each other to push the button, Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague, Reagan instructing Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!"

Archie Brown's whopping study, "The Rise and Fall of Communism," which is modest in tone but comprehensive in scholarship, marks an important effort to dig past those iconic stereotypes and painful memories and figure out what the hell was going on in that 75-year-long failed experiment called Communism. This is still an exceptionally difficult subject for Americans to confront with any clarity, I think. Our political life remains haunted in peculiar ways by the specter of Communism, which has become (to mix metaphors) an all-purpose ideological cudgel to use against one's enemies.

In some quarters, President Obama is denounced as a Leninist for suggesting tepid social-democratic reforms to the healthcare system (which come nowhere near the government-administered programs of Canada or Western Europe). To other critics, Obama is merely a spineless replica of a Cold War liberal, unable or unwilling to stand tall against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei the way Reagan did against the Soviet Union. Or, that is, the way he did in their mythical version of the story.

As Brown sees it, Reagan definitely played a role in the dissolution of Communism, but not the role most Americans think. Brown describes Reagan's confrontational first-term cowboy act, and his "evil empire" rhetoric, as almost entirely destructive, heightening tensions and strengthening the resolve of Kremlin hard-liners. It was in Reagan's second term, under the guidance of his pragmatic secretary of state, George Shultz, that he strolled amicably through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev, and negotiated a series of arms-control agreements that ended the threat of nuclear war in Europe.

One might summarize the central argument of Brown's sweeping tome this way: Communism meant different things to different people in different contexts, but the very things that made it successful, at least for a while, also paved the way for its destruction. A professor emeritus at Oxford and perhaps Britain's most prestigious Sovietologist, Brown has crafted a readable and judicious account of Communist history, from its theoretical beginnings in 19th-century Europe to its practical collapse at the end of the 1980s, that is both controversial and commonsensical.

Having served as an informal advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during a crucial period in the early 1980s, Brown has anti-Communist bona fides, and does not pretend to be a neutral observer. But given the immense sweep of time, ideology and geography he strives to cover in 600-odd pages -- as Brown observes, almost every one of his chapters could be a book on its own -- "The Rise and Fall of Communism" is a work of considerable delicacy and nuance.

Brown draws an important distinction between upper-case "Communism," to describe states governed by Marxist-Leninist political parties, and lower-case "communism," to describe the classless future utopia imagined by Marx, which no such state ever claimed to have reached. Furthermore, although those countries typically called themselves "socialist," Brown avoids the term. For one thing, Lenin and his followers were trying to steal the word away from the Western social-democratic tradition, which has produced elected leaders in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Australia and elsewhere. There is an evolutionary relationship between Western socialism and Soviet Communism, to be sure, but their bitter split predates the Russian Revolution, and many of Communism's sharpest critics have been socialists. It is no more meaningful to say that Stalin and George Orwell were both socialists than to observe that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Christians.

There is none of the jingoistic cheerleading in Brown's book that you'd get from an American neocon. He firmly believes that constructive engagement with the Communist world was morally and strategically superior to tough talk and saber-rattling. In fact, between the lines you can read an account of his influence: In 1983 Brown delivered a paper at Chequers, the prime minister's private retreat, that convinced Thatcher to talk directly to the Soviet leadership. In turn, she convinced her good friend Reagan to follow suit. Brown does not see all Communist regimes as identical or uniformly totalitarian -- the notorious police state of East Germany was vastly different from the relative tolerance and openness of Communist Hungary -- and believes they contained the possibility for genuine reform. Indeed, he points out that Gorbachev did reform Communism from within, before deciding to abandon it entirely.

As many anecdotes Brown lifts from recently opened Communist archives reveal, leading officials in the Soviet bloc were keenly concerned with events and perceptions in the outside world. To most ordinary people in the West -- and to many of our politicians, who ought to have known better -- the Soviet bloc looked like an implacable monolith in which a mysterious elite ruled over the terrorized and/or brainwashed masses. Men inside the Kremlin and other centers of Communist power, on the other hand, knew that their own populations were increasingly restive and saw the wealth and might of the "bourgeois democracies" arrayed against them. They understood that their hold on the reins of power was tenuous and contingent.

Brown focuses tightly on a series of factual historical questions as he hopscotches from the Soviet Union and its satellite states through Mao Zedong's China, Fidel Castro's Cuba, Pol Pot's Cambodia and other epiphenomena of international Communism. He pays some attention to significant non-ruling Communist parties -- especially the big ones in Italy, Spain and South Africa -- but his principal concern is the 16 nations that at one time or another were ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party recognized as such by the Soviet Union.

His central questions are these: How and why did Communists come to power in so many different places? How did their authoritarian and manifestly unpopular regimes hold onto power for so long? And why did most of them collapse so abruptly? He also addresses, at the end of the book, what might be called the question of Communist hangover: How have self-described Communist regimes endured in Cuba, North Korea and (at least nominally) China, long after the collapse of the international movement that once sustained them?

Next Page: Did Reagan really bring down Communism?

• 
• Read all letters on this article (108)
• Read Editor's Choice letters on this article (0)
• View blog reactions