Was the omelette really worth cracking so many eggs? The number of deaths due to famines, mass murders and other man-made catastrophes under communist regimes is something between 85m and 100m. In Cambodia, almost the entire educated population was liquidated. Mao Zedong was responsible for about 30m deaths in the lunatic great leap forward alone. Stalin’s gulag swallowed millions in its dark, frozen maw. And North Koreans are still dying of hunger.
To have remained a member of a communist party until the late 1980s, there must have been a residue of belief somewhere, deep down, that it might have been worth it, or at least would have been worth it, if things had not been so badly handled by the tyrants who ruled in the name of communism. Not many British intellectuals stuck it out for so long. Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent author of Age of Extremes, among other well-known history books, is one who did-not always as an active member, indeed for a long time as a sceptical one, but as a comrade none the less. In the Age of Extremes, he writes of the “unprecedented inhumanity” of Stalin’s Russia and he now says that the communist project “has demonstrably failed and, as I now know, was bound to fail.” But this makes his tenacity all the more puzzling.
In his latest book, a memoir entitled Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, Hobsbawm tries to explain why. Why he fell in line, in 1939, when Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union; or during the show trials in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and even after 1956, year of the Hungarian uprising. Words such as “background,” “generation” and “anti-fascism” abound. But also “pride”: a cussed refusal to give up on a course once embarked on with noble intent.
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