What a strange human being the historian Eric Hobsbawm was. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a new report by the New Culture Forum on attitudes to Communism almost a century after the Russian Revolution. It includes this exchange between Michael Ignatieff and Professor Hobsbawm:
Ignatieff: In 1934 … millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a communist?
Hobsbawm: … Probably not.
Ignatieff: Why?
Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing … The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and unnecessarily great. But I’m looking back on it now and I’m saying that is because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution.
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