Italian intellectuals, Cambodian peasants, Hungarian workers, Russian colonels, Angolan insurgents, French philosophes, American actors, British miners, Chinese craftsmen, Nicaraguan labourers: over the years, the adherents of the international communist movement have been so geographically and socially diverse as to defy classification. During the 100-odd years of the movement’s existence, nations as different as Czarist Russia, semi-feudal China and post- colonial Cuba subsequently developed into communist states. Marxist literature has been translated into hundreds of languages and read, by somebody, in all of them.
Perhaps as a result of this diversity, the literature on the international communist movement is stunningly weak. Though communism was of central importance to the 20th century, international chroniclers have too often adopted the turgid bureaucratic language of their protagonists, too easily become bogged down by the ideological squabbles they are trying to des- cribe, and were too frequently tempted to focus on one country, usually Russia, to the exclusion of others, especially those in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, only one group — the consortium of French historians who published the renowned Black Book of Communism in 1997 — has made a serious attempt to describe the movement from an international perspective, using new archives. But though that book touched on many different aspects of the movement around the world, its authors were mostly interested in describing the damage wrought by communism, not in explaining the attraction of Marxist rhetoric in the first place.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Robert Service’s Comrades is a deceptively ambitious book. Neither unreasonably long nor overwhelmingly theoretical, it swiftly chronicles the movement from its philosophical origins to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic transformation of China, along the way touching on Albania, North Korea and Cuba, among many other countries.
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