The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World by David Priestland
Allen Lane, £35
Once in every several hundred years mankind experiences a momentous cry from the rooftops; a cry of hope and optimism in the name of a newly observed social/philosophical vision attached to a conviction of fresh certainties. All history carries the footprints of such experiences. From the earliest scrolls of the ancient Hebrews through the birth of Christianity, via Greece and Rome, and so much more mankind has searched for the perfect formula enabling self-rescue. The endless challenge has always been and remains: how can we persuade mankind to accept some form of rational co-operation?
In this respect communism, as it developed in the 19th century, before exploding on the 20th, was no different from its predecessors. The message of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in all essentials was one of hope and aspiration, believing that the collapse of capitalism could, at last, open the gateways to a new heaven on earth. It didn’t happen. Like Moses and his ten commandments, it sounded good in theory. The trouble was that the irrational impulses of the human species were at work – as they remain.
I have argued before in these pages and will repeat: the most hopeful formula is that enlightened self-interest will eventually persuade global systems to opt for a form of democratic socialism as the alternative to self destruction. But on that the jury is still out.
The entire communist experiment was, of course, an exercise in over-optimism about what is feasible. It collapsed because the only way to sustain it appeared to be by authoritarian rule. That can only work, if at all, for a limited period. In the end the Soviet Union failed not because of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher or any of them but because of its own internal contradictions – akin to the kind of contradictions Marx had assumed, wrongly, were exclusive to capitalism.
Could it have been rescued had Gorbachev managed – as he wished – to inject some form of social democratic option? Unlikely. The task was too huge for the Russians to handle without massive international help and that was never on the cards.
Twenty years ago Reagan’s United States led the cheering as “the evil empire” collapsed. Such rejoicing was always going to be premature and we are still picking up the pieces of that collapse.
The sadness and disappointment of this book is its palpable failure to fully grasp the magnitude and global backlash from the collapse of Soviet communism. Despite massive research by its young academic author, David Priestland, his book sags when it tries – and sometimes the author seems not to try – to offer a crafted analysis. Of all recent books on the collapse of the Soviet Union and its version of communism this is the weakest – especially when compared with recent works by Archie Brown, Robert Service and Donald Sassoon.
The real problem is that Priestland has been too ambitious in trying to cover or, rather, merely chronicle, the entire range of communist development across the globe after the 1917 revolution. In the process he clearly found himself ranging through the myriad pathways of various revolutions in Vietnam, Cuba, China, Eastern Europe and Korea, often without pausing for breath, let alone analysis. The result is pages of chronicle, often superficial both in tone and breadth. Inevitably, the most glaring example of this simplicity is in his handling of the Soviet Union itself.
Priestland has very little fresh to offer in his analysis of Stalin’s role. He relies heavily on the assumption that Stalin’s behaviour was the result of “psychological peculiarities”. You bet they were. Who has ever doubted that? Certainly not Trotsky, let alone Freud. The question that is crucial in any serious analysis is what were the origins of these “pecularities”? Were they exacerbated by a deep inner feeling that he was surrounded by superior intellects such as Trotsky and Bukharin who, at their peak, overshadowed the crude party organiser from Georgia? That factor certainly left a scar which Lenin spotted shortly before his death. Then there was the suicide of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, to whom he was devoted, and who was probably the only woman – apart from his mother – whom he genuinely loved deeply. To be sure, all this played a powerful psychological role in corrupting an already damaged personality.
Yet the story lies deeper. The power lust had taken hold of Stalin by the time Alliluyeva shot herself. He couldn’t handle Bukharin’s intellectual challenge – which itself remains one of the tragedies of the Soviet revolution. Had Bukharin’s reformed socialism taken root – and it came close – the history of the Soviet Union might have been very different. The crucial years from 1931 through the terror of 1936-38 could, instead, have been liberating for a form of democratic socialism.
Instead, Stalin was determined to use every ruthless device to ensure an industrialisation which both saved the USSR in World War II – and, perhaps, the world – only to subsequently crucify the nation. By then it was too late for Khrushchev or Gorbachev to rescue the system. The tragic paradox of Stalin is that he chose the brutal path to survival which finally led to destruction.
What now is there to say? Communism, as practiced in and by the Soviet Union, is dead. But no one should imagine the ideological drive and impetus behind the concept of socialism, as defined by Marx and Engels, however revised and countlessly corrected, is dead. Far from it. No one can predict what eventually will emerge from the extraordinary amalgam of market capitalism and communist ideology in China where Deng Xiaoping picked up the threads from Bukharin’s discarded ideas. l
Geoffrey Goodman
