Comrades: A World History of Communism

From Marx to Mao, from Engels to Allende, from Lenin and Stalin to Ceaucescu and Castro, "Comrades" tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on material from many national collections and several major languages and is the most up-to-date account produced since the 1960s. Ranging across not only the high politics and ideology of the most prominent communist regimes but also daily life under communism, culture and propaganda, Service analyses communism's appeal abroad as well as local attempts to set up communist administrations. He ends by showing that there was more to communism than mere brutality and demonstrates that while communism in its primordial form is now dead in most countries, the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people have not vanished: economic poverty and political oppression. And the lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form. It is a highly readable, compellingly argued and an exciting work of history, if not always a comforting one.

About the Author :
Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony's College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Blood on the Snow, Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. Trotsky: A Biography was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize. Married with four children, he lives in London.

Review :
[A] brilliantly distilled world history of communism. -- Craig Brown "Mail on Sunday" (05/06/2007) [A] welcome comprehensive volume arrating the history of world communism. -- G. A. McBeath "Choice" (11/01/2007) In "Comrades!", Robert Service presents a lively and detailed account of the damage that was done in the name of "building socialism."..He lucidly explains how the Bolsheviks gradually imposed their will on an impoverished and often resentful populace. -- Michael Kazin "Democracy Journal" (06/01/2007) Robert Service's "Comrades" is a timely and ambitious book. Embroiled as we are with Islamic terrorism, the 20th-century struggle between world communism and western capitalism seems as remote now as the 1914 rivalries of kings and emperors must have seemed in 1945. But this was an equally desperate battle for ideas and power. Service strips away the illusions about communism that beguiled generations of admirers. From the moment in 1917 when Lenin forced the disparate revolutionary parties in Russia under his sway, communism became a system based on state terror and the dictatorship of elites in the name of the proletariat. -- Tim Gardam "The Observer" (05/13/2007) Service critically surveys communism's entire history for a general-interest readership... A panoramic introduction to the ideology, Service's account of communism's idealists and tyrants provides solid grounding in the subject. -- Gilbert Taylor "Booklist" (04/15/2007) Service has read widely--using the extensive archives and poster collection of Stanford University's Hoover Institution to good effect--and he has organised his material in an analytical narrative that sweeps the reader along for 500 pages. -- Michael Burleigh "Sunday Telegraph" (05/06/2007) Service has taken [on] a huge subject but he more than succeeds in doing it justice in this sparkling and thought-provoking narrative...[An] engrossing history. -- Richard Overy "Literary Review" (05/01/2007) The book succeeds in explaining what all the fuss was about, something that a whole generation that has grown up in the aftermath of communism's collapse needs to know. -- Lewis H. Siegelbaum "St. Petersburg Times" (06/08/2007) The decency of communism's ideals and the horror of its effects form the basis of Robert Service's masterly handling of the beginning, progress and (all but) end of communism. Service sees the miseries and tyranny which communists fought against; and he allows credit where it is due, as when he writes of Castro's regime that 'the poor of the island benefited most from the revolution. Blacks in particular were helped by government efforts to improve conditions.' -- John Lloyd "Financial Times" (06/30/2007) To the best of my knowledge, Robert Service's "Comrades!" is the first history of world communism. It includes every communist state, extinct and surviving, as well as major communist parties and movements around the world. It is a daunting undertaking that required mastery of vast amounts of source materials and the skill to make judicious choices among them...A rich repository of information and insight and should be required reading in institutions of higher education around the world. -- Paul Hollander "New York Sun" (06/27/2007)