Product Description

From Marx to Mao, from Engels to Allende, from Lenin and Stalin to Ceaucescu and Castro, Comrades tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on material from many national collections and several major languages and is the most up-to-date account produced since the 1960s. Ranging across not only the high politics and ideology of the most prominent communist regimes but also daily life under communism, culture and propaganda, Service analyses communism’s appeal abroad as well as local attempts to set up communist administrations. He ends by showing that there was more to communism than mere brutality and demonstrates that while communism in its primordial form is now dead in most countries, the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people have not vanished: economic poverty and political oppression. And the lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form. It is a highly readable, compellingly argued and an exciting work of history, if not always a comforting one.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #277609 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Review
Brilliantly distilled world history of communism... --Irish Mail on Sunday

New Statesman
'Dazzling synoptic pages of a book that bears all the hallmarks of
a classic work of historical literature.'

Catholic Herald
'Service's book has no competition. Solid, readable and with great
illustrations, Comrades is an admirable achievement.'

Customer Reviews

The People's Book is deepest red
For those historians who like to think big, and take the brave decision to write a book which tackles a very large concept, a long period of time or controversial idea, it is difficult not to fall in to a trap of excessive simplicity or letting the bigger picture slip away amidst a barrage of details. Few subjects are as complex, debatable or relevant as communism, and this is the story of an ideology that changed the world.

It is also a subject on which it is impossible to be neutral. Communism as a monstrous ideology which led to more deaths than Facism, a brutal system implemented by thuggish dictators? Or a utopian idea whose time was not right, or that was implemented in the wrong places? A brave attempt at challenging age old iniquities, or an concept with a foolish disregard for human weaknesses. With this in mind it is important to note that Robert Service does have a bias, but that all historians do, and he does his job as an academic historian well with a thorough grasp of the sources available.

Some have commented that Service does not come across as a fan of communism. To be fair this might be true, but then given the raft of evidence at hand of the excesses in the Soviet system this is unsurprising. What is more important is that as far as possible Service approaches the subject dispassionately and does not become a slave to an ideological dogma. Instead he is thorough in his research, and lets the evidence speak for itself.

Unsurprisingly he is an expert in the history of Russia, a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford and was one of the first historians to gain access to the Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR. Having written biographies on Lenin, Stalin and working on the end of this literary triptych with Trotsky, he has broadened his subject out to the ideology that most affected modern Russia, and looks at its historical roots, and its global impact.

Service is stronger when talking about Russia and Europe, with a wealth of experience and knowledge quite evident. But he is more than able when dealing with communism's impact around the world. He is not limited to a specific time period, and deals with the pre-19th century roots (albeit in a slight gallop - this is only a single volume) and the present day.

Service might be an academic historian, but he also has a flair for writing. He has an engaging and natural style, and an excitement and interest in the subject which leaps from the page. Russian history is well served by excellent writers, Orlando Figes, Richard Pipes and Simon Sebag Montefiore included, but Service now deserves a much higher profile amongst this quartet.

The only criticism is that it is a subject so vast as to be necessarily done a disservice by a single volume. But as a primer or introductory text, or as a very readable piece of history, it is excellent.

Again, weaknesses of Amazon's star system prevent giving a more accurate 4.5 stars. But it seemed harsh to drop down to a 4 for a really rather excellent book.

Anti-Communist but fair history of Communism
Robert Service, well-known conservative historian of Russia, has undertaken a difficult task in attempting to write a concise and accessible history of Communism as a political reality. In "Comrades", he has succeeded remarkably well. The most important issue in any such history is of course that of the author's own political viewpoint, and this can easily lead the undertaking off the tracks by excessive zeal one way or another (I am myself a convinced Communist, which must be taken into account in this review). Service, as a conservative Briton working at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University (itself a well-known right-wing think tank), cannot be accused of having any sympathy with Communism whatsoever, and he makes this clear enough throughout the book. Not just is the general interpretation severely negative with regard to the Communist experience, and his commentary implying that it was dangerous lunacy to even attempt it anywhere in the first place, but he also regularly uses fairly strong hostile language about it, such as the repeated comparisons of Communism with an "infection" and a "virus" and so forth.

Nonetheless, it must be said that Service has done a surprisingly good job of sticking to the facts and trying to be as even-handed as he can probably muster. The most important thing here is that he is not guilty of the historiographical crime of omission, in only depicting negative or dubious episodes in Communist history, like the old Cold War school used to do, but he actually also spends time detailing improvements, valid arguments and realistic motives on the part of Communist parties and leaders. This is not to say that Service is ever convinced by them, and he makes this clear enough, but the fact that he did so greatly improves the utility of the book.

What's more, despite it being a hard task to summarize Communism in just a few hundred pages without unbalancing the story or leaving out essential elements, Service has done this as well as anyone could demand. Although the focus is still heavily on the USSR and to a lesser extent China, as one could expect, there is plenty of attention also to the Communists in Western Europe, in Latin America, in other Asian countries and even in Africa. There are two chapters dealing with Cuba, and the Warsaw Pact nations are described at length. Service's background to the history in the form of his analyses of Marx&Engels and Lenin are reasonable, and he takes care to distinguish where applicable between the general viewpoints of Marx & Engels, Lenin and Stalin respectively, as well as between Stalin and Mao and their successors.

That said, not all is well. Service relies far too much on dubious and explicitly right-wing sources, some of them wholly unreliable or false (Chang & Halliday, Li Shizui, Conquest) or seriously slanted (Gaddis, Courtois etc.), while modern 'left' sources such as Fitzpatrick, Khlevniuk, Lewin and Meisner get short shrift relatively. Although he makes few real errors, there are still some discredited stories included, and especially near the end of the book his anti-Communism gets the better of him sometimes. Service also has little understanding of economics or the policy questions involved, and often just parrots Hoover Institution type viewpoints with little comprehension; he seems besides to have concluded a priori that even social-democratic policy necessarily leads to crisis and failure, despite at the same time insisting that the social-democratic road is supposedly the only way to achieve reforms as opposed to Communism. One wonders then if the people in the developing world are supposed to overthrow their elites by means of conservatism, according to the lights of Robert Service? Has liberalism or conservatism ever achieved this since 1848? Those sorts of greater questions of political and historical significance are too easily ignored, which makes Communism appear more as a stubborn aberration than it is.

Being a sympathizer with Communism in general, whether Leninist or otherwise, I can't say that reading Service's book is easy or entirely free of frustration. Nonetheless, if one takes into account what the world must look like from his point of view, Service has done a remarkably decent job in writing a history of what are essentially his enemies. Moreover, it can't hurt at all for Communists to read a history that acknowledges the same facts, as is necessary for any dialogue on the topic, but interprets them negatively where we would interpret them positively or hopefully: this can help enormously with keeping perspective, strengthening the arguments in defense, and recognizing past errors. For that reason and for its well-structured and concise writing, Service's book is useful reading, even if by no means the last word on the subject.

Readable account of communism
The author has written a reasonable account of communism. He shows how communism derived from a number of ideas that lie far back in time - many existing well before the French Revolution. He discusses various movements that led to liberalism and socialism - all stemming from the so called Enlightment.

The socialist branches themselves subdivided into several different types of socialism of which communism was one sub-branch and this in itself was divided further since Marxism was initially only one type of communism.

At this stage he gives a brief outline of the some of the main ideas behind Marxism (i.e. 'inverted' Hegelianism, the surplus value theory of economics, historical necessity and so on). This introduction gets the ball rolling. Although he later mentions that Soviet theorists decided that Marx must have derived many of his ideas from Kant as well from Hegel contrary to what many scholars had previously thought, Marxism, Marxist-Leninism and Maoism never get the sort of in-depth theoretical disection in this book that a philosopher or an economist would like (even an amateur economist or philosopher) but only enough information is given to enable the author to get the history moving.

The author then deals with the Russian Revolution, the history of the USSR, the spread of communism to China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere after the Second World War and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fate of communism parties in Western Europe and elsewhere.

Although the author isn't the best prose writer I have ever read, his style isn't as awful as another reviewer claims. It is readable though not inspired. The author doesn't hide the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism from readers. Altogether this is a fascinating read on an immense subject.