Comrades: The Rise and Fall of World Communism - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004

Comrades: The Rise and Fall of World Communism. Robert Harvey. John Murray. [pounds sterling]25.00. 422 pages. ISBN 0-7195-6147-7. In this fast moving and well written survey the former MP turns his attention to the greatest evil the world has ever known, in whose name and for whose furtherance countess millions suffered and died.

The story of Communism was 'the most spectacular rise and fall in global history'. Mr Harvey rightly describes it as a religion but one which was in reality 'a shattering global human experience'. He divides his text into three parts. The first, 'Explosion', looks at Marx's inheritance and the growth of Communism in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, Cuba and Latin America. The second part, 'The Communist Universe' looks at Communism in its middle age: the efforts of Khruschev and his immediate successors to reform the corrupt system in the USSR, the travails of Chinese Communism, the Cultural Revolution and the introduction of capitalism, the tragedies of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland and the difficulties faced in Western Europe, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan and Latin America. The third and final part looks at the Collapse of the system, first in the USSR and then in Eastern Europe and then turns back to the USSR. 'Communism has no future once people realise ... that it delivers neither equality nor prosperity in this world, and even worse, only extinction in the next'.