Review by Choice Review
At the peak of their influence, communist regimes controlled one-third of the world's population, and for 150 years, the ideas of Marx challenged liberalism and other global ideologies. This well-written but long volume critically surveys the rise and fall of communism. Priestland (history, Oxford) defines communism as "a movement whose goal was to overcome inequality and bring modernity, but it was founded on the view that this could only be achieved by radical means, ultimately through revolution." (p. 571) The volume begins with the French Revolution and mostly follows a chronological order, yet Priestland pauses often to introduce seminal thinkers (Marx, Lenin) and actors (Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, and others). He illustrates the diversity in communist history through analyses of the interrelated strands of romantic, radical, and modernistic (and technocratic) Marxism, as well as adaptive and pragmatic responses of communist regimes. The author also presents the conditions spawning successful movements--backward agrarian economies in which industrialization developed late and sporadically and workers were poorly organized. The volume is more than a political and ideological history because of the author's effective use of art and literature to symbolize themes and transitions in different countries. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. G. A. McBeath University of Alaska Fairbanks
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Reviewing the failure of Communist regimes, Priestland recurs throughout to a basic cause: their inability to win allegiance from the populations they governed. As in Robert Service's Comrades! A History of World Communism (2007), the opposition that Communists encountered when in power guides Priestland's narrative; he also stresses the importance of ideology in shaping Communists' policies to create the egalitarian utopia of their Marxist dreams. In broad terms, Priestland distinguishes two varieties of twentieth-century Communists: romantic, agitprop radicals, and command-and-control modernizers. The doctrinal and power disputes within every Communist Party that seized the state ramified throughout the country it ruled, from Russia to Cuba, affecting the scale of repressions and, on the other hand, the degree of loyalty accorded to the regime. Bringing synthesis to a historical topic riven with specialization, Priestland comprehensively covers communism's roots in nineteenth-century critiques of capitalism, Leninists' and Maoists' attacks on markets and campaigns to forge socialist consciousness, and the eventual enervation of Communist enthusiasm that prefigured the revolutions of 1989. An impressively knowledgeable overview of communism's Promethean ambition to perfect humanity.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Priestland, a lecturer in modern history at Oxford, delivers almost 700 pages of stormy history, but the pace never flags. Underlying the narrative is a nuanced understanding of communism as an ideology that took on different forms (romantic, radical, modernist) depending on local and historical context. But all were inherently unstable. According to Priestland, the Jacobins of the French Revolution planted the seeds of modern communism. They claimed to be building a modern state on principles of true, universal equality while treating those who disagreed as enemies of equality. In the following century, Marx proclaimed communism's scientific basis and the inevitability of global revolution. The 1917 Russian revolution caught everyone's attention, but despite universalist rhetoric, Soviet Communism became nationalistic and technocratic. This violated Marxist principles, but appealed to poor, rural nations after WWII. From Russia, Priestland moves to Latin America, Cuba and Africa, covering Communist guerrilla uprisings and urban terror, and the eventual lagging of economic development in the Soviet empire and China. The former collapsed and the latter has discarded Marxist ideology. Detailed and scholarly but written in lively prose, this is a rich, satisfying account of the most successful utopian political movement in history. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
