The Rise and Fall of Communism is a general history of the roughly eighty year period that spanned the Russian ‘revolution’ of 1905 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In parts it’s fascinating and incisive, but in others it’s rather pedestrian.
If you want an outstanding general history of the Russian Revolution up until the death of Lenin, you need look no further than Orlando Figes’ brilliant A People’s Tragedy, and Brown’s coverage of those events is a pale shadow of Figes’.
However, Brown scores with his in-depth analysis of the Gorbachev era. He takes the unpopular view that the Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher played almost no part in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. Rather, it was Gorbachev himself who, unwittingly, set the course for its collapse with his initially gentle reforms starting in 1985. As he became more and more radical, so the reforms gathered pace and eventually ran out of his control.
Brown’s argument is that a Communist regime could be maintained, pretty much no matter what the state of the economy, providing the state was prepared to use force to suppress dissent. Crucial for the leaders of those countries aligned with Moscow was the implicit understanding that the USSR would intervene militarily as they had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 if they relaxed their policies too far. As it became apparent in the mid to late 80s that Gorbachev would not countenance such intervention, the Eastern Bloc collapsed.
The Soviet Union itself outlasted its satellites by a mere couple of years, perhaps because, by 1989, it had ceased to meet the Brown’s of a Communist regime in any case. In effect, the political system ceased to be Communist in 1989. Eventually, Gorbachev resigned as President of a non-existent country.
Looking back on these events, they seem inevitable, and politicians have since claimed that the Communist collapse was the result of a co-ordinated and far-sighted strategy. Not so, says Brown. In 1982, there were no Western commentators predicting the fall of the USSR in a mere nine years, or even in ninety. Not one. Reagan’s policy following Gorbachev’s selection as General Secretary was of engagement with a view to containing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Exactly the same policy as Nixon, Ford and Carter had pursued in other words. No one on Reagan’s staff believed their more relaxed policy would bring down the ‘Evil Empire’. In fact he argues that Reagan’s earlier hard line with Moscow propped up the hard-liners far more than any other factor. With a hostile and clearly identifiable enemy to point to, there was little question in the Soviet power structure that concessions to the West would be taken as evidence of weakness, and thus none were forthcoming.
Events in the Soviet Union in the period 1989 to 1991 were chaotic, to say the least. In a sense, analysis is almost impossible, because the power structures that had sustained the regime were so badly fragmented that the events themselves seemed to be in charge. One cannot really speak of ‘leadership’ in the last three years of the Soviet Union. Neither Gorbachev, Yeltsin or any other individual or institution was in control in a normal political sense. It’s remarkable that what had been such a disciplined party and state should end in such total chaos. It’s of necessity, then, that Brown’s narrative becomes a little hard to follow, with new names coming and going just as I remember them doing on the news at the time.
Brown’s narrative jumps around geographically in order to keep the events in a rough chronological order, so the Prague Spring is covered fairly close to the Vietnam War rather than to the Solidarity inspired uprisings in Poland in 1981 or the brief premiership of Imre Nagy in Hungary. There’s not really any other way to write a general history, but the inevitable result is some rather startling changes of context, and events that are closely linked in terms of policy or effect are often hundreds of pages apart.
There are excellent chapters on Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in particular, but the DDR is hardly covered in any depth at all. Perhaps more understandably, there’s even less about Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia. Brown’s coverage of China is very detailed and up to date, but perhaps detracts from the more interesting Moscow-centric story. In many ways the stories are separate anyway, and it might have been better to publish two volumes rather than to keep cutting between Asian and European communism. That said, China provides an excellent case study for Brown’s claim that a sufficiently brutal regime can survive given appropriate economic, rather than political, reforms.
The major flaw of the book is that there is very little coverage of domestic Communist policy in any country, except in times of crisis, and even then we’re rarely given an insight into what ordinary people experienced. The Brezhnev era is largely ignored entirely, and even periods with plenty of policy detail to cover, such as the post-Lenin, pre-war USSR are only covered for their political intrigue. One gets very little feeling for what kind of life an ordinary citizen would have had, almost at any point.
This has the effect of suggesting that all that happened in Communist countries was high politics, repression and propaganda, so things like the successful Soviet race to beat the Americans into space, the impressive improvements in industrial output, literacy and infant survival rates, or what impact these made on the populace at large, are completely ignored.
These criticisms notwithstanding, this is an excellent, well-argued and readable general history of Communism, but one that rarely inspires or excites.
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