Seeing Red: Why Communism Really Failed

History has different levels, wrote the great French historian Fernand Braudel. There is, famously, the longue durée the slow, almost imperceptible movement of time over several centuries. Geography and climate play dominant roles in it, and ideas change slowly and gradually. The French Revolution was but a moment in the West's long tradition of violent struggles, Jean-Jacques Rousseau a mere comet in the galaxy of democratic theory. Braudel contrasted this historical time (he called it Level C) to the traditional subject of history writing (Level A), in which brute facts follow brute facts. The better exemplars of Level A history depict human beings galloping breathlessly along, as in a novel: in haste and excitement, from one event to the next, until the inevitable denouement. Even Braudel's elegant prose could barely conceal his disdain for the genre.

This is the kind of history that Robert Service has produced. His survey of the history of international communism is readable. Its verdict -- that the system was awful and deservedly collapsed -- is not contentious. Comrades! will be popular. But it will soon be forgotten because it leaves the reader with his original hunger for explanations about causes and effects, cycles and connections.

World communism deserved a better account: it was made to measure for Braudel's Level B, the analytic recounting of great blocks of history, whether they spanned one decade or two or five. Braudel devoted only a few perfunctory pages to communism in Grammaire des civilisations, his high school textbook from the early 1960s. He regarded it as a new "civilization" (a term he used with no normative implications), for, like many of his contemporaries, he could not fail to be impressed by the momentous industrialization it brought and the possibility that it might allow the Soviet Union to catch up with the West.

Historians today know better, of course, hindsight being a great clarifier. Unlike Braudel, they know that the great communist experiment failed. But they need to resort to a Level B approach to explain properly the movement's itinerary, paying due attention to the differences between various forms of communism and their contrasting evolutions. A Level B account of communism must begin with the basic facts, of course, but it must also conceptualize the processes underlining communism's development.

RISE AND FALL

The communist movement was born on November 7, 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace, and died between November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union was abolished. The Bolsheviks claimed communism as their guiding ideology, but the slogans that earned them support, helped them win the Russian Civil War, and allowed them to complete their revolution -- peace, land, bread -- were not communist. The Bolsheviks rose in a power vacuum they had not brought about; when the tsar abdicated in March 1917, they were a tiny group within the large and diverse Russian socialist movement. Lenin's complex explanations for the Communists' positions -- including his nonpacifist justification for the Bolsheviks' opposition to World War I -- were irrelevant. What mattered was what they did, not why they did it.

Unlike their counterparts in relatively democratic western Europe, all the main strands of the Russian socialist movement opposed the war. The fate of Western Socialists had become entwined with that of the "bourgeois state" they claimed to despise, whether imperial Germany or republican France. All things considered, this was a state with which they could coexist: its institutions protected them somewhat, and its prosperity had started to trickle down to the working classes. This became the basis for the momentous split between Socialists and Communists in the West: the former's goal of reforming capitalism could not be reconciled with the latter's objective of modernizing the state without it.

In Russia, by contrast, the socialist movement -- of which the Bolsheviks were an integral part -- owed nothing to the state. The Bolsheviks believed tsardom deserved no support and gave it none -- hence the ease with which the two-headed, hook-beaked eagle of the Romanov dynasty was "spat out," as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put it, "like the chewed stump of a cigar." Yet what the Bolsheviks soon built was not a "socialist society" (as they described it) -- at least not according to the meaning generally ascribed to the term "socialist society" by traditional Socialists everywhere else, namely, a society in which property would be collectively owned and the state would begin to wither away. In fact, the Bolsheviks' first move was to give land to the peasants (who had started taking it anyway), thus increasing the importance of private property in the new state. Some of their subsequent measures -- from massive state intervention during the civil war to the limited market reforms of the New Economic Policy in the 1920s to the amazingly costly industrialization of the 1930s -- owed little to ideology and a lot to the kind of improvised pragmatism that societies in the midst of chaos and revolution tend to display.