Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of Communism

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Mr. Brown puts together a deep perspective on the Communist phenomena touching on the writings of Marx and Engles in the nineteenth century and those who were precursors of the "founding fathers"; loosely like Locke's influence on America's "Founding Fathers". Obviously the prime focus is in the twentieth century but also somewhat in this past decade. Although the author looks at the final five survivors of Communism (Cuba, China, North Korea, Viet Nam and Laos) and their attempts for footholds in Africa and the Caribbean, the tome mostly focuses on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe Bloc behind the Iron Curtain, which Mr. Brown admits has been his major area of study. The insight into the Gorbachev-Yeltsin transition period is especially powerful and enlightening as Mr. Brown insists that Gorbachev's reforms led to unintended consequences for the party and the empire. In every case except for the rather short Prague Spring, Trotsky's theory of the party substituting for the workers always led to harsh dictatorships and usually to internal power struggles especially when change at the top occurred. Well written throughout the large volume, the conclusions are profound based on solid arguments; for instance the surviving nations all claim the purest form of communism, as each governs differently and that the utopian socialist workers' state has never been attained. However, once again it is the fall of the Iron Curtain that is the most insightful section of a fascinating look at THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMUNISM.

Harriet Klausner

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.

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!

Brown has several strong areas, above all the Gorbachev years. In fact, I'd love to see him do a separate book called "The Last Years of the Soviet Union" or similar. That said, the book has other strong points, primarily in some of the specifics of how different Eastern European parties interacted with Moscow, and in raising some philosophical questions about just what makes a country communist and whether or not a country like today's China is still communist.

That said, without exactly feeling crammed, I would have loved to have seen another 60-100 pages in this book, and perhaps trimmed the Marx-Engels introductory material, which one would think any reader of this book would already know.

That relative thinness, for a book this important, is the main reason it doesn't quite get a fifth star. It's a definite four-star, if not 4.5, but plenty of other reviewers, besides the disgruntled Kindle reader, will give it five anyway.

This is an excellent text on the history and political science of Communism. The text is suitable for novices and for scholars of Communism. Brown describes the history of Communism from its roots to the modern day events in an interesting and nicely written style.

This is a tough, but rewarding read. Brown's history of communism is as much of world history as it is a history of an ideology. He covers nearly every part of the globe in a way that is complete but never boring. His chapters on the Soviet Union and China are incredibly complete (frankly, there is still no great biography of Brezhnev or on some of the Chinese leaders after Mao) while his insights into Cuba and eastern Europe also are fully illuminating.

The paragraphs are packed with dense text and complex arguments that build upon one another so that a reader looking for a single answer as to why communism succeeded or failed probably isn't going to be satisfied. Rather, he shows how key leaders, intellectuals, freedom of information, economic growth (or not) all played important roles in how societies developed.

One final critique, while this is primarily a history, Brown does a nice job of bringing theory into both the beginning of the book and the ending so that a reader seeking to explore broader questions about communism and its role in history can ponder them long after the final page.

Archie Brown's "The Rise and Fall of Communism" represents the best in anti-Communist scholarship on the history of Communism as a political movement. Brown, a long-standing specialist in Soviet history at Oxford University and a specialist on Gorbachov, wrote this book to explain how Communism could become such a powerful political movement on the global scene in such a short time, how it remained in power, and how it eventually fell apart and lost most of its hold over world politics. He does so from a decidedly liberal point of view, having little sympathy with Communism's aims or methods, but in an intelligent and relatively nuanced way. While he is clearly not a sympathizer, he is not an inveterate Cold Warrior like Robert Service either, and he attempts (especially early on in the book) to give Communist politicians and governments their due in terms of their accomplishments. While I certainly do not think that he has in any way presented the best historical case for Communism one could make, it is nonetheless a breath of fresh air compared to most historiography on the subject.

"The Rise and Fall of Communism" is organized in a chronological way, with some geographical excursions. It begins with a very brief overview of the rise of Marxism as a body of thought in the context of the 19th century and as distinguished from anarchism and utopian socialism, and then very quickly moves on to the Russian Revolution. By far most of the book is concerned with Soviet history, which is after all Brown's field of research, and he deals with the Russian civil war, the NEP period, Stalin and Stalinism, and the postwar period in due order, with much political detail. There is a lot of attention for the differences between various Communist politicians, both within the USSR and in the context of Communism in Eastern Europe during the Warsaw Pact period (which gets a relatively large amount of space), and the political and ideological spheres are clearly Brown's main point of interest. Economics clearly is not, and while here and there he undertakes some economic analysis, this is mainly to strengthen a first and foremost political narrative and it never goes beyond repeating some well worn insights by the likes of Kornai and some vague generalizations about planned economies. Brown never goes at all into the question why, if planned economies are inherently flawed, they functioned so well for such a long period of time - economic theory questions clearly do not interest him, which is a limitation of this book.

Another serious drawback of the book is the very short shrift given to non-European Communism. There is a chapter on China and one on Cuba, and then Communism everywhere else gets a very short bit in the middle, but that is all. This is very disappointing, especially taken into account that the ideas of Communism today, in their Leninist form, are by far the strongest numerically in Asia, and that from the Chinese Revolution onward always a majority of all people living under self-proclaimed Communist govermments have been Asians. This reflects a more general hesitation on the part of the author to take international context fully into account, other than in terms of direct diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries or the US; there is always the tendency to see Soviet decisionmaking as essentially a domestic affair. This makes a lot of Soviet politics difficult to explain and makes it look much harsher and more aggressive than was necessarily the case, because the constant threat from outside, in the form of American geopolitical maneouvreing against the USSR as well as the many proxy wars often close to Soviet borders are in this way not kept in constant view. It must be said though that Brown here merely follows established practice in the historiography of the Soviet Union, which is even now strongly infected with Cold War attitudes and an unwillingness to consider the American threat to the USSR as seriously as the reverse.

Nonetheless, it must be said that the authors social-democratic sympathies do not preclude him from giving an extremely informative and well-structured political history of Communism if we do indeed understand that in the limited sense of 'Third International Communism within Europe'. The political decisionmaking and change in the USSR is presented exhaustively yet never in a boring way, and the full inclusion of Eastern Europe is a welcome change from many similar works' exclusive focus on Soviet affairs. Brown is willing to give Soviet politicians their due where he thinks they deserve it and does not entirely ignore the many advances made during this period, while many of his criticisms, in particular in terms of free expression and cultural freedoms, are quite deserved. His suggestion that many of the revolts in the 1950s and 1960s against Soviet domination were in essence an attempt at a different kind of socialism, unlike those of the 1980s which were explicitly anti-socialist, is an important point often overlooked. The same goes for his analysis of Gorbachov's period of rule, in particular the manner in which Gorbachov started out as a reformer of the 'Communist' system but became, over time, a Western style liberal social-democrat. While I think Brown's naivété with regard to economic questions makes him look more unreflective and uninformed than strictly necessary, this does not distract from the overall interest of the book. This is by no means the last word on the subject of Communism and its history, and there have been and will be many Communisms, but it is a good place to start.

Outstanding! The book is not too long and yet sufficiently details the story of communism and the related Cold War. Acclaimed Oxford scholar Archie Brown makes the right choices in writing this exceptional book on the rise and fall of communism without the book being too long. This is the benchmark.

The book explains how communism could have been appealing to so many people, how it did not deliver on its promises, and how it collapsed and disappeared so thoroughly. The beginning of the book covers the ideas of communism and the revolutionaries that espoused them, so critical for understanding how this twisted fantasy could have been so attractive to many people and spread around the globe. The Soviet Union is the main focus of the book. The early escalation of the Cold War is fascinating. Another strength is the detailed explanation of how communism unraveled at the end -- obviously it did not deliver on the promises when totalitarianism abused the people and economies. Gorbachev played an unwitting role in the demise of communism in USSR with his Perestroika and Glasnost reforms, which allowed freedom in the Soviet empire. This is a great book on the fall of communism in USSR.

Brown was an advisor to Margaret Thatcher for awhile and has an anti-communist view, but this book is very fair and scholarly. Brown is a leading scholar of the Cold War, and this book is the benchmark book on the subject.

I also recommend is the excellent The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis for a history of just the Cold War. Brown's book should be followed with the excellent (but one-sided and not the whole story) The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, which has some details not included in The Rise and Fall of Communism. The two excellent books compliment each other.

Highest recommendation!

Archie Brown's book traces the rise and fall of communinism, with a strong emphasis on the Soviet Union, which is his area of expertise. It might have been better have the title reflect that we are talking about Europe and the Soviet Union, mostly, because Asia is almost an afterthought here.

Nonetheless, it is a thorough treatment of a broad topic over a period of a century and hits the high points. The book teaches you that there were differences between nations behind the Iron Curtain, that it was not all united Bloc, much as the Soviets wanted it to be. The book gives you some perspective - the break up of the Soviet Union had some precendents in the Hungarian revolt in 1956; the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Also, the sections on the break up of the Soviet Union and the end of Communinism in Eastern Europe are especially strong. I picked up the book hoping to get some serious insight into what I believe was the most important development on the world stage in my lifetime, one that I still regard as seriously underreported, and the book delivered. Brown also deserves credit for being very straight forward regarding a topic that seems to draw commentators more interested in shading history than reporting it.

The author covers the history of communism roughly from the publication date of Marx' manifesto to about 2008.
It is easy to read in the sense, that the sentences are not convoluted, and that the story narrated is really interesting. (Of course, for someone like me -mid fifties- it might still be more interesting, as we lived through much of that period).

The book has over 600 pages, covered in small print - and this is the reason I deduct one star: For the interested layman, it is just a bit too much. Maybe 150 pages less and it would have been perfect (for me!)