8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why Communism Fell, October 25, 2009
This review is from: The Rise and Fall of Communism (Hardcover)
One of the current debates is what ended the cold war. American's have suggested that Ronald Reagan played a decisive role by accelerating the arms race. The inefficient Soviet economy could not keep up and the Soviet leaders had to divert an increasing share of production to military spending. This eventually lead to the collapse of the Soviet Economy. This book discusses the rise and the fall of communism and the reasons for them both.
Brown takes the opposite approach from that of American triumphalism. He suggests that intensification of the cold war generally entrenched the position of communist hard liners in the Soviet Union. It turned attention away from the question of whether things were working. Also the collapse of the economy is not itself sufficient to lead to the collapse of a communist state. Look at North Korea an economic basket case but one in which the regime is currently rock solid. This due to the huge amount of state resources invested in the security organs and very tight controls over the flow of information to the population as a whole.
What led to the collapse of communism in Europe was one thing and that was the role of Gorbachev. He decided to reform the political structure of the Soviet State. One this happened and the party was not kept in power by force the old structures melted away. The communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been kept in place by the threat of invasion from the Soviets as had happened in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. One Gorbachev signalled that this was not going to happen those regimes fell quickly. Market reform followed on from political change. Brown points out that one of the major success of communist regimes was the huge spread of literacy and the increase in the numbers of people who received tertiary education. This in turn led to a huge dissatisfaction and intellectual rejection of the basis of the regime. You couldn't pull the wool over peoples eyes.
Rather than power being lost due to violent overthrow reform in Europe was by those in power deciding that the system was not working and needed change.
In the East things worked differently. China and Vietnam kept in place an authoritarian state but introduced a market economy. The success of the market economy in raising living standards was such that it diminished the clamour for reform of the political systems.
In an aside Brown speculates whether economic reform might have saved the communists in Russia. He sees the key to China's success as the reversal of the collectivisation of agriculture and allowing the peasants to not only have their own farms but to run whatever business they chose. He quotes one of the former rules of Russia who said that the Russian farm workers had been in collectives so long that they had any personal initiative or enterprise knocked out of them.
The book is good and it explains how the communists, at all times a tiny minority were able to punch above their weight. It was their ruthlessness and cruelty. Characteristics shared by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful one volume history, packed with info. Though it can be a bit dry and feels much squashed into 700 pages., January 28, 2011
This review is from: The Rise and Fall of Communism (Hardcover)
No review can do justice to a book like this. Archie Brown has tossed off the definite one volume history of communism. Though for those not enthused with the idea of plunging into 700 pages of politburo paperwork, then Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes is still the most entertaining and readable history of communism, with sparingly fewer pages. (There is another new book by Priestlan called Red Flag, also 700 pages thick; I'm gonna read that sometime and so I would like to know what other people think of the two books side by side).
There are tons of facts in Archie Browns book and also funny asides, such as Brown's own experiences with real commies and other delude nut-jobs and the book got exciting towards the end with Boris Yeltsin's dismantling, rather than collapse, of the Soviet empire.
Though the later parts were entertaining, I must say, the first few chapters on the history of utopian ideas, Karl Marx, and the general 'coming of god on earth' atmosphere were a bit rushed (only around 30 pages). No harm done there, as it's only a one volume book. However, academics or students wanting to research this period can get more information by nipping into any library and picking a book on the actual period. I thought Brown's version read like a synopsis of planned chapters.
Also, the exciting revolutionary period he is covering only took place about three generations ago and so it would be worth reading the actual books from the period to get a flavour of this excitement. Archie Brown, wisely, isn't a true believer. Eric Hobsbawn, on the other hand, was and as well as being a fantastic writer, red Eric has a fantasticly entertaining eye for imagery and can write about the menace of the 5 foot 2 inches dead body of Josef Stalin that terrorized so many millions when alive. This image stayed with me for many sleepless nights. Unfortunately Archie Brown isn"t as good a writer and so he can't make his characters come alive and so the uninformed reader is left wondering, just who the charismatic one in the story was? Also, why did Karl Marx have such a pull on intellectuals of the period? Brown doesn't make it clear. John Gray's Black Mass is the book on illusion of optimistic ideas.
The writer Francis Wheen reckons that Karl Marx, rather than the Beatles, was bigger than Jesus. If you doubt this or if you want to get an idea of how true this was in the 20th century, then read Isaiah Berlin's biography of Karl Marx. It was written around the 1940's, at the height of Communist power, and it's the most penetrating book on 18th and 19th century political philosophy you will ever read (Isaiah Berlin was a genius and a great prose man himself and, also, he was the big man of liberty, so if he can get swept away by the rush then thats saying something); I read Berlin's biography of Marx in college, before I even heard of Karl Marx and Isaiah Berlin, and the idea of history as God and Marx its prophet, was solidly ingrained in my mind. Isaiah Berlin just falls over himself in heaping praise on the genius of Karl Marx, just as today we heap praise on the genius of Albert Einstein. So this gives a flavour of the mood at the time.
(And this is even weirder when we realize that Isaiah Berlin is known today as the grand guru of freedom. Tony Blair even wrote Isaiah Berlin a letter, asking his permission for socialism. Just as the 19th century Russian thinker Vera Zasulich wrote Karl Marx a letter asking his permission for communism. Unfortunately Isaiah Berlin was just dead and so couldn't reply; but Karl Marx said, sure, just go ahead).
Berlin's book is only around 200 pages, so if you are serious in researching this period in history, then you will be doing yourself a big favour by reading that book first, rather than the 40 odd cramped pages in here.
Also, a nerdy point but I think it's worth making. Brown keeps accusing Marx of 'wishful thinking' in predicting the coming of communism and all that. But the real reason that Marx was wrong is the paradox of induction, made famous by Sir Karl Popper in his Poverty of Historicism. So Popper's your man for the explanation or you can read the more recent Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, which is also about the problem of induction.
One other pretensiously over-long and somewhat heretical question on the soundness of communism (or I may just need to get out more). Archie Brown rightly lists the crimes of Communism and he is right in pointing out the superiority of our capitalist civilisation over the commie experiment.
We can all agree that communism in the 20th century was a nightmare, and that the big dictators deserve to burn in hell or, if the Hindu's are correct, come back as worms for the dogs and birds. But, if you read this book with an objective head, rather than an academic, then you may see that communism as an ideology did not cause the mass starvation of the 20's and 30,s! The real cause, though Archie Brown only brings this up on page 221,; the real cause of the famine was the Marxist-Lenninist crackpot fear of real science, made real in the adsurd form of a self-taught geneticist called Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko used cod Lamarckian theory to 'grow' crops for the Russian bear; thus starving millions in the process. Lysenko's sugar daddy, of course, was Joseph Stalin. Stalin stood by as Lysenko turned the Soviet Union into a desolate wasteland; this seems to have pleased comrade Stalin! Stalin, you see, preferred Lysenko's pseudo scientific bilge, because; well look at it this way; in Lamarkian theory you violently beat the crops to strengthen the next harvest (didn't work), so Stalin wanted to beat his people like metal, on the anvils of the communist/Lamarchian ideology, to strengthen them for the next generation! ("Lamark's ideas were progressive and Darwinism is pessimistic like proper science should be" - Steve Jones). This is why Stalin liked Lysenko's ideas; so much so that he killed all the scientists who spoke out and, unbelievably, Lysenko's ideas still ruled well into the 1950's. Mainstream history holds that it was Lysenko's experimenting with crops which led to zero crop rotation, but the idea that communism equals famine has become an a-priori truth. So today we all 'know' that famine is in the bones of communism; even though the annals point to the use of cod Lysenko 'science', rather than real science to power communism, as being the catalyst which tore at the Russian belly. So the logical reasoning is this; no Trofim Lysenko equals zero famine, and, here is the heretical bit, if there was no famine (that is, if the Soviets used real science), then communism may not have been so discredited at the starting line? I really do need to get out more! You think? Also we can ask what if they didn't invent, erm, dictators! But that's just wishful thinking. Archie Brown doesn't mention Stalin's embrace of crackpot ideas over real science and other ridiculous communist terrors that killed off human nature.
Here is another funny thing I have just noticed in the pictures section. The picture sections are the routine pictures starting with Marx and Engels all the way up to the 1980's. Now the photographs covering the late 20th century are full of grey old men in suits. You see grey old men everywhere these days. During the World Cup I saw a grey old FIFA guy shaking David Beckham's hand. And the people running the International Olympics Committee are all grey men wearing the same suits. If you Google the European parliament, hey, there they are, grey old bureaucrats. Or Google the American congress or the Supreme Court and there they are again, old men in suits. This is probably a good reason why communism became pants!
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