The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism ed. by Stephen A. Smith (review)

Once upon a time not too long ago, the Soviet bloc divided Europe pretty much down the middle; the East was Red, and the specter of communism, boldly invoked by Marx and Engels in the previous century, haunted the rest of the world. Then, within a few decades, what had been the only actually existing alternative to the rule of capitalism all but vanished. Even where, as in China and Vietnam, ruling parties continued to call themselves Communist, capitalism came to dominate their economies. How did this happen? What accounts for the global upsurge of communism from the First World War through at least the 1950s, and what led to its even steeper decline?

These are the questions that animate The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism. It is by no means the first to grapple with them. In 1975, just as communism was reaching its zenith in terms of the number of countries ruled by parties claiming adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles, three dons from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, published their highly Eurocentric version of a world history of communism. Over twenty years later, a very different kind of project by a team of French scholars, some of them ex-Maoists, resulted in Le Livre Noir du Communisme: Crimes, Terreurs et Répression (1997). This swingeing indictment provoked Le Siècle des communismes (2000), which, also the product of a group of French scholars, was more latitudinarian (and included a contribution by this reviewer). More recently still, Robert Service, also of St. Antony’s, took a whack at a global history. Aside from getting some facts wrong—always a danger in going global—Service’s book was highly opinionated (Stalin was a “bad man,” Mao, a “political thug”) and oblivious in its exposition of Communists’ extremism to the extremity of circumstances in which they found themselves. Finally, the past few years have seen a flurry of histories: The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World (2009) by David Priestland, he too of Oxford, though not St. Antony’s College; A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism (2010), edited by Service and Silvio Pons; Silvio Pons’s own rendering of international communism as Global Revolution (originally published in Italian in 2010 and translated into English in 2014); and Cambridge University Press’s forthcoming answer to Oxford’s handbook, for which it has recruited Stephen A. Smith and Silvio Pons as editors.

Stephen A. Smith, renowned as a historian of revolutionary Russia and no less distinguished for his work on Chinese communism, has edited the volume under review. His introductory essay, “Towards a Global History of Communism,” lays out the volume’s parameters, provides a chronological overview of “the arc of Communist Revolution,” and presents an analytical framework for understanding the specificities of Communist politics, economics, and social and cultural polices. The 35 essays that follow, written by “a highly international team of scholars,” are divided into six sections: ideology (essentially devoted to Marx-Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the “-isms” associated with them); “global moments” (1919, 1936, 1956, 1968, and 1989); regional variants (Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Islamic World, and Africa); political practices ranging from inter-state relations among Communist governments to cults of personality, political terror, popular opinion, economic modernization, collectivization, and consumerism; social relations involving communist militants, peasants, workers, women, social hierarchies, and national identity; and finally, culture—Cultural Revolution, the artistic intelligentsia, popular culture, religion, and sport.

Although each essay reflects the orientation and perspective of its author, most convey a fine appreciation of the contradictoriness of communist practices, viz., the internationalist impulse on the one hand, and the promotion of national cultures and national identities on the other; the provision of social security but also the fomenting of insecurity; the overcoming of grinding mass poverty, but the production of massive famines; the improvement in women’s positions, but the maintenance of patriarchal values; the...