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  • The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe by Kristen Ghodsee
  • Benjamin Carter Hett
The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe, by Kristen Ghodsee. Durham, Duke University Press, 2015. xx, 231 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 (paper).

Kristen R. Ghodsee wrote this book by mistake, as she tells us in her engaging and personal manner. In her case, it was a chance encounter with the physicist Freeman Dyson, who then asked her to look up some Bulgarian books about the fate of his friend Major Frank Thompson, who died in 1944 as a 23-year-old soe officer fighting alongside anti-royalist partisans in Bulgaria.

Following this very personal beginning, Ghodsee’s project has a major thesis and a major methodological corollary. The thesis is that she seeks to rescue the narrative of Communism in Europe from what she considers tendentious treatment at the hands of post-1989 triumphalist conservatives, and to stress the courage and idealism of many Communist activists. The methodological corollary is that she approaches this problem through a very personal lens — through the experience of the British Major Thompson and the Bulgarian Lagadinov family, four of whose members fought as Communist partisans against the pro-Nazi Bulgarian government. She tells us she writes as an “ethnographer,” using the individual stories to open “a window onto the past (xix).”

These individual stories are truly powerful and moving. While a student at Oxford in the 1930s, Frank Thompson, older brother of E.P. Thompson, absorbed the leftist idealism so characteristic for young intellectuals of the day. It was this spirit, mixed with great courage, that took him to Bulgaria and his early death, shot as a partisan after being tortured (as often happens in these circumstances, there are wildly differing accounts of his death). The four Lagadinov siblings (brothers Kostadin, Assen, and Boris, and their sister Elena), by contrast, were the children of a village peddler who [End Page 139] gravitated to the Communist movement and then to equally courageous armed opposition to their “German king.” Kostadin, Boris and Elena survived the war. Assen did not — he too died bravely, taking a horrendous risk for his comrades, just a month before the Red Army reached Bulgaria.

These narratives form the first section of the book. The second section focuses on the postwar story of Elena Lagadinova, who rose to a prominent place in the Bulgarian Communist leadership, but whose life after 1989 shifted into a decidedly minor key — her straitened material circumstances matching her unhappiness with the political direction of the last twenty-five years.

In the spirit of Ghodsee’s personal approach, let me say that I liked this book much better than I expected to. This mostly has to do with Ghodsee’s lively, honest, and engaging writing, and the sense it conveys of a thoughtful person wrestling with difficulties, which she does not try to simplify or minimize. It is refreshing to read the work of a scholar who is clearly conversant with various forms of fashionable modern theory, but has the grace to leave their rebarbative jargon out of her prose.

Yet neither Ghodsee’s thesis nor her methodological corollary is quite as original as she thinks. Such scholars as Andrew Port, Paula Bren, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Stephen Kotkin — to name just a few — have written nuanced appreciations of life in Communist systems, free of triumphalist polemic, and often relying on the same sort of personalized methodology. Furthermore, it is simply wrong to paint critiques of Communism — whether scholarly or otherwise — solely as a product of triumphalist capitalism. It is an ancient truism of politics that there is no anti-Communist like a Social Democrat, and certainly there has been no shortage of post-Cold War scholars — Tony Judt comes to mind — who have been scathingly critical of the Communist project and the brutality, crime, and human waste of the “real, existing” Central and East European Communist regimes from a centre-left perspective.

If I may illustrate the point with a further personal comparison: I wrote a biography of a man...

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