The Rise and Fall of Communism

Since the days of Marx and Engels, scholars have been writing about communism and what it means to contemporary society. For the past 30 years Brown (politics, emeritus, Oxford Univ.) has devoted his considerable energies to explaining various aspects of the history of communism, especially in the Soviet Union. His 1996 study, The Gorbachev Factor, and his more recent Seven Years That Changed the World are two essential works from the more than a dozen books he has authored. Although his new book compares topically with Robert Harvey's A Short History of Communism and Robert Service's Comrades!: A History of World Communism, Brown's particular strength is his profound knowledge and understanding of the 1980s, when Gorbachev took power and initiated the reform agenda that led (although this was not his intention) to the collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and freedom for Eastern Europe. Brown's study also treats China, Cuba, and other Communist countries, but his analysis is especially impressive for the Soviet Union. A seminal work from a distinguished scholar; highly recommended.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Essential history of a multifaceted political movement that ended in tears in many placesbut endures in many others. There are few people more qualified than Brown (Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, 2007, etc.) to write authoritatively on the communist states of the world; during a 40-year career he has studied in most of the principal powers. Many of them, he notes, are no longer communist. The remaining fiveChina, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnamare more different than alike in critical respects of governance. Brown charts the origins of communism to pre-Marxist millenarianism. With the work of Marx and Engels the doctrine solidified and codified, though it would be transformed in the hands of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao Zedong. The author notes Trotsky's famous observation that in Russia, the process of party substitutionismwhereby the party stood in for the working class, the central committee for the party and the head of the central committee for the committee itselfwould inevitably lead to dictatorship. So it did, with Stalin's police arresting nearly 1.7 million Soviet citizens in 193738 alone, executing at least 818,000 of them. Communists are as famous as any other ideologues for intramural squabbles, as Brown observes, such that many refuse to acknowledge that communism has ever held powersince " 'communism' was to be the ultimate stage of socialism which they never claimed to have reached"and many others claim to have the lock on the true form of the doctrine (think Kim Jong Il). Brown's analysis of these various strains of belief is spot-on, but the best part of the book comes at the close, when he undertakes a nearly blow-by-blow account of the end of the Soviet regime behind the closed doors of the Kremlin, the subsequent fall of a dozen communist states and a host of unintended consequencesincluding the reunification of Germany, which "the most committed opponents of the regime in East Germany, including those who led the demonstrations in October 1989," had not really wanted. Historical writing and political analysis of the highest order. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Since the days of Marx and Engels, scholars have been writing about communism and what it means to contemporary society. For the past 30 years Brown (politics, emeritus, Oxford Univ.) has devoted his considerable energies to explaining various aspects of the history of communism, especially in the Soviet Union. His 1996 study, The Gorbachev Factor, and his more recent Seven Years That Changed the World are two essential works from the more than a dozen books he has authored. Although his new book compares topically with Robert Harvey's A Short History of Communism and Robert Service's Comrades!: A History of World Communism, Brown's particular strength is his profound knowledge and understanding of the 1980s, when Gorbachev took power and initiated the reform agenda that led (although this was not his intention) to the collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and freedom for Eastern Europe. Brown's study also treats China, Cuba, and other Communist countries, but his analysis is especially impressive for the Soviet Union. A seminal work from a distinguished scholar; highly recommended.—Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames