http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/books/09book.html?_r=1&hpw
Books of The Times Communism's Path: A Once-Vigorous Idea That Has Lost Its Muscle By DWIGHT GARNER Published: December 8, 2009 In 1946 George F. Kennan described communism as a "malignant parasite" that "feeds only on diseased tissue." More than six decades later, this parasite has been nearly eradicated from the planet. Communism in its most traditional form - now that China has adopted free-market reforms - survives, as if frozen, like smallpox in a laboratory test tube, only in Cuba and North Korea. AKG-Images Graphic arts glorified communism. Above, a 1928 German poster celebrating 10 years of the Soviet Union. THE RED FLAG A History of Communism By David Priestland Illustrated. 675 pages. Grove Press. $30. Related Excerpt: 'Red Flag' (pdf) Jerry Bauer David Priestland Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine, Paris "On Your Horse, Proletarian!" (1919) from the Russian civil war. Enlarge This Image AKG-Images An 1898 German cartoon shows the traditional political parties drowning. Communism isn't merely spent as a political force. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has grown stale as a topic of intellectual consideration. Islamic radicalism - though it's closer to fascism - has stolen communism's insurgent, anti-imperialist thunder. Karl Marx's critique of capitalism had a minor resurgence after last year's banking crisis, but "minor" is the ringing word here: few economists have begun citing "Das Kapital." Historians are to blame, too. They've pounded what's left of our interest in communism to tatters in recent years. From Oxford University historians alone we have had Robert Service's 592-page "Comrades: A History of World Communism" (2007) and Archie Brown's 736-page "Rise and Fall of Communism" (2009). David Priestland, the author of the bricklike volume in front of us this morning, also lectures at Oxford. Two years, three enormous volumes of general-interest global history, totaling more than 2,000 pages. What comes to mind is less Trotsky's dustbin of history than the bargain-bin of history down at the local bookshop. Don't these gentlemen talk to each other at elevenses? "The Red Flag: A History of Communism" has the misfortune of arriving last in this sober post-May Day parade. Mr. Priestland has the misfortune, too, of not being as vivid or confident a writer as Mr. Brown, whose "Rise and Fall of Communism" is consistently superb. But "The Red Flag," despite its textbooklike aroma - that is, its over-reliance on parched summary and its lack of consistently forceful arguments or narrative drive - does do a few things memorably and well. Mr. Priestland pays rapt and fascinating attention to the artists - the writers, painters, playwrights, comedians and film directors - whose work was inspired by, or more often forged in revolt against, communism. "The Red Flag" contains small, excellent disquisitions on works by Bertolt Brecht, Isaak Babel, Sergei Eisenstein, Milan Kundera and many others. Mr. Priestland might have pushed his book, profitably, even further in this direction. "The Red Flag" also captures, as well if not better than any of these books, the early appeal and essential optimism of communism, at least as an abstract political idea. The Romantic Marxist tradition, Mr. Priestland recalls, was "more interested in human authenticity and creativity than in taking political power and building modern states." People would not work for money; economic life would be transformed; repressive, autocratic regimes would be cast aside; the wretched of the earth would be given a hand up. A friend of Lenin's, Nikolai Valentinov, wrote that Russians were attracted by Marxism's European nature: "Marxism came from Europe. It did not smell and taste of homegrown mold and provincialism, but was new, fresh and exciting. Marxism held out the promise that we would not stay a semi-Asiatic country, but would become part of the West with its culture, institutions and attributes of a free political system." Under communism, according to Marx's early dictum, each person could "do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." The world could, frankly, use a few more hunter-fisherman-shepherd-critics. Mr. Priestland's book is deadly serious in its depiction of the violence, repression and economic disaster that communist regimes left in their wakes. He also scoops ups a good deal of telling pitch-black humor along the way. About the violence that spread across China as a result of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao said, "It's a mistake when good people beat up on good people, though it may clear up some misunderstandings, as they might otherwise not have got to know each other in the first place." The bulk of "The Red Flag," however, is a stolid and largely by-the-numbers recitation of communism's rise and its spread, in various manifestations, across the globe. He closely observes the lives and thoughts of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Khrushchev, Mikhail S. Gorbachev and many others. The power communism amassed was enormous. "For a few years," Mr. Priestland writes, "from 1949, Communist regimes, most of them closely allied with Moscow, ruled a third of the earth's population." "The Red Flag" perks up near its close, as the revolutions of 1989 come into view. Mr. Priestland argues, persuasively, that communism's end in the Soviet Union "was not brought by a broad-based middle-class revolution; it was a much more elitist affair." By 1986, even at the Soviet Union's Communist Party headquarters, one writer observed: "It was clear that only a complete hypocrite could believe in the supremacy of socialism over capitalism. It was also clear that the socialist experiment had suffered defeat." Mr. Priestland gives far more credit, in terms of bringing down the Soviet Union, to Mr. Gorbachev than to President Ronald Reagan. Communist rule imploded, he writes, "not from pressure from without but as a result of an internal nonviolent revolution, staged by the elite of the Communist party itself." Communism has been discredited to such a degree that there is little chance of it re-emerging as a political force, Mr. Priestland notes, though he writes that "extreme inequalities of wealth" and other factors could lead to "a new form of extremist left-wing politics." We should beware these inequalities, he writes, and also beware the West's sometimes "messianic" desire to export its "system - sometimes by force - across the globe." Communism may be all but dead, and let's tramp the dirt down, but the injustices and resentments that brought it to life are thriving almost everywhere. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
