Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University. With The Rise and Fall of Communism, he has won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for best political science book of the year for a second time. He also received that award for one of his earlier books, The Gorbachev Factor. He lives in England.

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From the internationally acclaimed Oxford authority on Communism, a definitive history that examines the origins of the ideology, its development in different nations, its collapse in many of those countries following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe.

The Rise and Fall of Communism explores how and why Communists came to power; how they were able, in a variety of countries on different continents, to hold on to power for so long; and what brought about the downfall of so many Communist systems.

For this comprehensive and illuminating work, Brown draws on more than forty years of research and on a wealth of new sources. Tracing the story of Communism from its nineteenth-century roots, Brown explains both its expansion and its decline in the twentieth century. Even today, although Communism has been widely discredited in the West, more than a fifth of humanity still lives under its rule.

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The Rise and Fall of Communism

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

The Idea of Communism

'A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.' When Karl Marx began his Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 with these famous words, he — and his co-author, Friedrich Engels — could have had no inkling of the way in which Communism would take off in the twentieth century. It became not merely a spectre but a living reality. And not just in Europe, but for hundreds of millions of people spread across the globe — in places very different from those where Marx expected proletarian revolutions to occur. Communist systems were established in two predominantly peasant societies — the largest country in the world, Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union, and in the state with the largest population, China. Why and how Communism spread, what kind of system it became, how it varied over time and across space, and why and how it came to an end in Europe, where it began, are the central themes of this book.

Marx's claim was an exaggeration when he made it in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century it had become almost an understatement. That is not to say that the 'Communism' which held sway in so many countries bore much resemblance to anything Marx had envisaged. There was a wide gulf between the original theory and the subsequent practice of Communist rule. Karl Marx sincerely believed that under communism — the future society of his imagination which he saw as an inevitable, and ultimate, stage of human development — people would live more freely than ever before. Yet 'his vision of the universal liberation of humankind' did not include any safeguards for individual liberty.1 Marx would have hated to be described as a moralist, since he saw himself as a Communist who was elaborating a theory of scientific socialism. Yet many of his formulations were nothing like as 'scientific' as he made out. One of his most rigorous critics on that account, Karl Popper, pays tribute to the moral basis of much of Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century capitalism. As Popper observes, under the slogan of 'equal and free competition for all', child labour in conditions of immense suffering had been 'tolerated, and sometimes even defended, not only by professional economists but also by churchmen'. Accordingly, 'Marx's burning protest against these crimes', says Popper, 'will secure him forever a place among the liberators of mankind.'2 Those who took power in the twentieth century, both using and misusing Marx's ideas, turned out, however, to be anything but liberators. Marxist theory, as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently refashioned by Josif Stalin in Russia and by Mao Zedong in China, became a rationalization for ruthless single-party dictatorship.

During most of the twentieth century Communism was the world's dominant international political movement. People reacted to it in different ways — as a source of hope for a radiant future or as the greatest threat on the face of the earth. By the middle decades of the last century there were Communist governments not only in a string of Soviet satellite states in Europe but also in Latin America and Asia. Communism held sway in what became the 'Second World'. The 'First World' — headed by the United States and its main European allies — was to engage in prolonged struggle with the international Communist movement for influence in the 'Third World'.

Even in countries with strong democratic traditions, among them the United States and Great Britain, many intellectuals were drawn for a time to Communism. In France and Italy, in particular, Communist parties became significant political forces — far stronger than they were in Britain and America. The French and Italian parties had substantial popular as well as intellectual support, together with significant parliamentary representation. After Communist systems had been put in place not just in Eastern Europe and Asia but in Cuba, too, it seemed to some at one point as if the system would triumph also in Africa. The global rivalry between the West and the Communist bloc led to prolonged tension and the Cold War. At times that came close to 'hot war' — most notably during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The rise of Communism, even more than the rise of fascism, was the most important political phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. For Communism turned out to be a much stronger, and longer-lasting, movement — and political religion — than fascism. That is why by far the most significant political event of the later part of the century was the end of Communism in Europe — and its effective demise as an international movement. The decline, which preceded the fall, occurred over several decades, even though these were highly contradictory years which saw also Communist advances. It was after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had exposed some of the crimes of Stalin in 1956 that Communism had its singular success on the American continent — in Cuba — and that its Asian reach expanded to embrace the whole of Vietnam.

It is worth noting at the outset that Communist parties did not call their own systems 'Communist' but, rather, 'socialist'. For them, 'communism' was to be a later stage in the development of society — the ultimate stage — in which the institutions of the state would have 'withered away' and would have been replaced by a harmonious, self-administering society. Throughout the book — to reiterate an important distinction — I use 'commun-ism' when referring to that fanciful future utopia (and 'communism' also for other non-Marxist utopias), but 'Communism', with a capital 'C', when discussing actual Communist systems.

Excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Communismby Archie Brown Copyright © 2010 by Archie Brown. Excerpted by permission.
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