Comrades: A World History of Communism

Comrades: A World History of Communism. Robert Service. Macmillan. [pounds sterling]25.00. xviii + 571 pages. ISBN 978-1-4050-5345-7. Survey histories of this breadth are always dangerous things to attempt. When tackled by any hands other than Prof. Service's, readers should be wary. In this case the author, already famous for his biographies of Stalin and Lenin, knows his ground, from Russia to China, from Cuba to South America, from Italy to Cambodia, from 1917 to the 1990s. He begins inevitably with Marx and Engels, German thinkers whom he rightly describes as 'Victorian intellectuals', and then shows how 'Marxism encoded their dangerous brilliance'. The end result was a system of specious theories which justified dictatorships more evil than the world had ever seen. Prof. Service is equally at home with both political theories and political manoeuvrings. He writes clearly and succinctly. His will not be the last book written on this scale but it will stand as one of the best, a valuable contribution to our understanding of a movement that has tragically dominated most of our lives. (A.C.T.)

COPYRIGHT 2008 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning