The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. - book reviews

National Review, July 31, 1995 by David Pryce-Jones

WITHIN the former Soviet bloc, nobody of any repute has appeared to defend Communism or to lament its demise. It has been left to a veteran Communist in the West, Eric Hobsbawm, to do that. Often he refers to Communism as ``socialism,'' but that is word-play. A key sentence of his book reads: ``The failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism.'' The whole murderous enterprise would start again, if he had his way.

Hobsbawm has lived through all but a few years of what he calls the Short Twentieth Century, the period from 1914 to 1991. The historian, he writes, has the high calling of being a professional remembrancer of what other citizens wish to forget. However, instead of bearing witness and remembering, Hobsbawm, an emeritus professor at the University of London and the New School for Social Research, deals in the usual omissions and misrepresentations whereby Communists have always converted history into their cause. It would take a book of equal length to set straight this tendentious record. The core doctrine of Marxism was that capitalism and Communism were mutually exclusive classes doomed to fight to the finish. In reality, the issue lay neither in class nor in money but in the rule of law. In this century, lawless revolutionaries, whether Soviet or Nazi, enforced their political monopoly through terror.

The thrust of this book obscures how Communists and Nazis used comparable justifications and methods in the assault against law-based societies. The victory of law makes no impression on Mr. Hobsbawm. Defensive mystification starts with the numerous classifications, great and small, imposed upon the period: the Age of Total War, for instance, the Golden Age, the Age of Catastrophe, the Crisis Decades, the ``disturbed Seventies'' and the ``traumatic Eighties,'' ``the age of the automobile and of the cinema,'' but then ``the age not of Henry Ford but of Benetton.'' Some of these ages run coincidentally; some turn without a break into their opposite. ``It is no accident,'' as Hobsbawm likes to repeat, Pravda-like, without irony. These classifications stem from the prior need for class war to seem to be moving from one stage to the next. The thematic treatment further allows material introduced in one place to be qualified in another, and retracted or contradicted elsewhere. Ranging across countries and continents, Latin America in particular, Hobsbawm brings in science, post-modernism, a variety of statistics, and much else as evidence of the alleged toing and froing between Communism and capitalism. Much of this is informative in itself even though the organizing principle is too fanciful for it. As in a thousand Communist hack works, the underlying historical reduction could hardly be more simplistic.

Thus, ``Marxism offered the hope of the millennium.'' Lenin and the Bolsheviks could have behaved in no other way in 1917 and afterwards. They won popular support and legitimacy, but the rest of the world let them down. The Slump vindicated the command economy, while almost scuppering capitalism, and producing Hitler.

Stalin modernized and industrialized the Soviet Union, and this was ``a towering achievement.'' Without it, Hitler would have won the war. For the sake of the arms industry, American and other capitalists spurned Stalin's friendship, and so were responsible for the Cold War. Western governments saved themselves after 1945 only by adopting the command economy, but were typically ungrateful. No mention of the secret Soviet rearmament of Germany between the wars; and never mind the lessons in violence that Hitler learned from Lenin and Stalin. The Hitler - Stalin Pact and the carve-up of Poland are dropped as asides. Presented as a creature of economic circumstances and nationalism, Hitler seems merely feeble, in contrast to Lenin and Stalin busily reinventing mankind. His crimes seem almost secondary. The reader is carefully sheltered from anything that might lead him to draw the obvious comparisons between the kindred totalitarian systems. For Hobsbawm, the Communist form of organization was ``a formidable innovation of twentieth-century social engineering.'' Ordinary people in this view really are the masses, fit only to be regimented by admirable revolutionaries. A certain minimum, it is true, has to be grudgingly conceded, but this can be glossed over when returning to the topic under some other classification. Stalin may have been ``an autocrat of exceptional, some might say unique ferocity, ruthlessness, and lack of scruple,'' but still he showed ``a sound sense of public relations'' in turning himself into a czar. ``For a collection of peasants and animal-herding peoples mentally living in the Western equivalent of the eleventh century, this was almost certainly the most effective way of establishing the legitimacy of the new regime.'' So much for them. Airy dismissals such as that conceal enforced collectivization and famine, with deportation and death for millions, including whole ethnic groups, and the destruction of settled ways and faiths. No mention of Beria and the machinery of mass murder, or even of the KGB. Only one victim is singled out by name, the famous geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. No mention of the numerous slave rebellions or factory and camp riots, nor of dissidents incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals.