From Publishers Weekly
In this incisive study, Service (A History of Modern Russia) surveys the varieties of communist ideologies (from Marx to Marcuse) and regimes (the Soviet Union getting the lion's share of attention) and finds a coherent pattern, which he forthrightly labels totalitarianism. Communism's hallmarks, he argues, include violent dictatorships, rigid, all-encompassing states that shackle civil society, persecute religion and stifle individual freedom. Communist systems impose dowdy fashions and stagnant economies staffed by listless workers. Rather than historical vagaries, Service contends, these are necessary features of communism, rooted in Marxist-Leninist doctrine and essential to regimes that needed suffocating repression to keep a lid on popular discontent. Service's critique is overwhelmingly negative, with scathing portraits of Communist leaders, intellectuals and fellow travelers like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whom he calls "Stalin's admiring slugs." Yet he manages to be fair; he calmly exposes crimes of Communist regimes, nods at their achievements (especially those of local Communist administrations in India and Western Europe) and smiles at the poetic neocommunism of Mexico's Subcommandante Marcos. In his fluent narrative style, Service covers a lot of ground, sometimes too cursorily; the book could use more statistics, especially on the performance of Communist economies. Still, though bound to be controversial, his is an engaging and useful introduction to a world-shaking movement. 24 b&w photos. (May)
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Author of Lenin (2000) and Stalin (2005), Service critically surveys communism's entire history for a general-interest readership. His guiding thesis is the similarity of structures established and problems faced by all communist regimes that seized power, with special focus on those of the Bolsheviks in Russia. The Bolsheviks' dictatorial organization and coercive methods were replicated, as was the main impediment they faced in their quest for a total revolution of human society: the hostility of the people they ruled. Service particularizes the forms communism's unpopularity took in every communist country, narrating the solutions--applications of terror and attempts at reform--that communists devised for opposition. From the Russian incubus, Service extends communism's story to its dreams of fomenting world revolution, touching on the Communist International's efforts in the 1920s and 1930s, the hammer-and-sickle's territorial expansion after World War II, and the fortunes of out-of-power parties, from the big one in France to the miniscule one in America. A panoramic introduction to the ideology, Service's account of communism's idealists and tyrants provides solid grounding in the subject. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
In this incisive study, Service surveys the varieties of communist ideologies (from Marx to Marcuse) and regimes (the Soviet Union getting the lion's share of attention) and finds a coherent pattern, which he forthrightly labels totalitarianism...In his fluent narrative style, Service covers a lot of ground...Though bound to be controversial, his is an engaging and useful introduction to a world-shaking movement. (Publishers Weekly 2007-03-19)
Service critically surveys communism's entire history for a general-interest readership... A panoramic introduction to the ideology, Service's account of communism's idealists and tyrants provides solid grounding in the subject.
--Gilbert Taylor (Booklist 2007-04-15)
To the best of my knowledge, Robert Service's Comrades! is the first history of world communism. It includes every communist state, extinct and surviving, as well as major communist parties and movements around the world. It is a daunting undertaking that required mastery of vast amounts of source materials and the skill to make judicious choices among them...A rich repository of information and insight and should be required reading in institutions of higher education around the world.
--Paul Hollander (New York Sun 2007-06-27)
The book succeeds in explaining what all the fuss was about, something that a whole generation that has grown up in the aftermath of communism's collapse needs to know.
--Lewis H. Siegelbaum (St. Petersburg Times 2007-06-08)
[A] brilliantly distilled world history of communism.
--Craig Brown (Mail on Sunday 2007-05-06)
The decency of communism's ideals and the horror of its effects form the basis of Robert Service's masterly handling of the beginning, progress and (all but) end of communism. Service sees the miseries and tyranny which communists fought against; and he allows credit where it is due, as when he writes of Castro's regime that 'the poor of the island benefited most from the revolution. Blacks in particular were helped by government efforts to improve conditions.'
--John Lloyd (Financial Times 2007-06-30)
Robert Service's Comrades is a timely and ambitious book. Embroiled as we are with Islamic terrorism, the 20th-century struggle between world communism and western capitalism seems as remote now as the 1914 rivalries of kings and emperors must have seemed in 1945. But this was an equally desperate battle for ideas and power. Service strips away the illusions about communism that beguiled generations of admirers. From the moment in 1917 when Lenin forced the disparate revolutionary parties in Russia under his sway, communism became a system based on state terror and the dictatorship of elites in the name of the proletariat.
--Tim Gardam (The Observer 2007-05-13)
Service has produced a wide-ranging history that traces communism's intellectual origins back through early modern Europe to ancient Greece as well as its modern spread to countries covering a third of the earth's surface...One of the best-ever studies of his subject...Eschewing the usual convoluted language of Marxist debates, he provides a gripping account of communism's intellectual origins, pedigree and impact...A remarkable accomplishment, and worrying reading. Even though Soviet communism as an idea may have failed, its interaction with the Russian population contains a powerful warning...A reader emerges from Mr Service's volume with the sobering conviction that the only enduring means of preventing political extremism is to establish and maintain healthy institutions of civil society: a tall order indeed. (The Economist 2007-05-12)
Service has taken [on] a huge subject but he more than succeeds in doing it justice in this sparkling and thought-provoking narrative...[An] engrossing history.
--Richard Overy (Literary Review 2007-05-01)
Service has read widely--using the extensive archives and poster collection of Stanford University's Hoover Institution to good effect--and he has organised his material in an analytical narrative that sweeps the reader along for 500 pages.
--Michael Burleigh (Sunday Telegraph 2007-05-06)
In Comrades!, Robert Service presents a lively and detailed account of the damage that was done in the name of "building socialism"...He lucidly explains how the Bolsheviks gradually imposed their will on an impoverished and often resentful populace.
--Michael Kazin (Democracy Journal 2007-06-01)
[A] welcome comprehensive volume arrating the history of world communism.
--G. A. McBeath (Choice 2007-11-01)
About the Author
Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Russian History at Oxford University.
