It's very ambitious in scope and largely delivers on its promise. At the same time while providing numerous interesting touches of detail it largely sanitizes all the gory aspects of what in the end was a the most murderous ideology in this planet's history (putting Nazism to shame). Extremely dispassionate which is not necessarily bad in a history book but I think in its effort to maintain an objective narrative it shies away from aspect which is important to today's view of communism. ( )

O comunismo foi um dos mais poderosos movimentos políticos e intelectuais que o mundo alguma vez testemunhou. No auge da sua influência, o comunismo governou um terço da população mundial. Contudo, talvez mais surpreendente do que a rápida implantação do comunismo e o seu extraordinário alcance foi a sua derrocada em Novembro de 1989. Nesta obra, David Priestland relata a história épica de um movimento que se enraizou em dezenas de países ao longo de 200 anos, desde o seu nascimento após a Revolução Francesa até à sua maturidade ideológica na Alemanha do século xix e à sua ascensão ao poder (e subsequente queda) no século xx. Principiando pelos primeiros comunistas modernos, na era de Robespierre, o autor analisa os motivos de pensadores e líderes, incluindo Marx, Engels, Lenine, Estaline, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev e muitos outros. ( )

I guess the biggest problem with this book is that the author was trying to cram in a lot of history into a single volume. He starts the book with Rousseau and the Jacobin French revolution and ends with the fall of the Soviet Union and records the progress and the vacillations of the leaders and the parties. He mostly focuses on the Soviet Union and its satellite states with some attention given to China too. The Global South is mostly given a brief summary or simply skimmed over. This also mainly focuses on the “great men” or the top leaders and their individual aspirations.

He draws from a lot of diverse sources and frequently quotes from novels, films, worker’s diaries and personal letters. These for me were the most interesting part of the book as they provide an insight into the people’s views regarding both the hope and optimism that pervaded, and the fear and violence that accompanied it, both during and after the revolution.
He shows that the collapse of the Soviet Union happenned because of a clique in the party and not from any discontentment of the people. He points put that the biggest strength of the party in USSR was that they claimed a moral superiority despite the lower standards of living than the west. So when Gorbachev claimed that the past 60 years since the ascendance of Stalin were a failure, it led to massive disenchantment among the people as they still believed that they were creating a more equal and just society.

He also shows the various forms in which Marxism has manifested itself through the history all over the world, greatly influenced by the local culures. He also categorizes the communist ideology into three main strands of Romantic, Radical and Modernist.

This book does havve many interesting parts but is in no way a complete history of communism. It is also a narrative of some fascinating inside stories but not any kind of an analysis.
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A fairly magisterial study of Communism from a non-ideological standpoint. Indeed, Priestland quickly passes over some of the landmark events and personalities of Communist history that would normally make an appearance in such a work, whether written from a Leftist or a Rightist standpoint (the murder of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, the assassination of Trotsky, the fall of Lavrenti Beria after Stalin's death, the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis). The examination of the role of the West in bankrolling the Communist world from the 1970s onwards was new to me; certainly a secret history as far as most examinations of post-war history are concerned.

Priestland draws two important conclusions; firstly, that Utopian ideas and ideals can be very dangerous if they descend into dogma (and it doesn't matter what your definition of 'utopian' is). And secondly, that sharp inequalities and perceived injustice can make those same Utopian ideas seem very appealing. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the world financial crisis of 2008, Priestland hoped that the world's dominant powers would have learnt that lesson. Sadly, from the viewpoint of 2015, that does not seem to be the case; and extreme ideas of whatever colour seem to be common currency nowadays, with inherent dangers for us all.

After reading Tony Judt's classic history of Europe, Postwar, and Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (in which he largely updates classic Jeffersonian arguments for smaller government to meet the rise of the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s) I decided I wanted to know a little more about communism as a separate and distinguished historical idea David Priestland's Red Flag fit the bill. Priestland begins with the French Revolution and its impact on Karl Marx. The young German carried the calls for liberty, fraternity, and equality into the economic realm. Marx produced an enormous amount of writing, which resulted in two different and largely distinct variants of communism. The younger Marx was more radical and romantic in his views of class struggle, the middle class, and effects of revolution. This romantic vision espoused democracy and freedom as the primary ideals of communism and saw revolution as a productive purge of society. In the wake of the failed revolutions of the mid-19th century, an older Marx questioned the wisdom and motives of the working and middle classes. What emerged was a more modernist and technocratic vision. Instead of rights and democracy, the modernist persuasion pursued planning. Lenin made important contributions (hence the phrase "Marxism-Leninism)to the development and emergence of communism. He espoused revolution, sharpened the divide

with non-revolutionary leftists such as Social Democrats, and recognized that culture counted as much as economics in ushering in a new order. He also (unintentionally) illustrated the limits of pragmatic reforms. After his radical revolution, Lenin realized a democracy of the working classes could not be achieved instantly and instituted his New Economic Policy (NEP). This concession to individual initiative and private property failed to achieve the desired results and things looked very bleak indeed inside the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Stalin emerged after Lenin's death in 1924 to implement a modernist version of Marxism. Priestland argues that Stalin was not a monomaniacal dictator, but a true believer of Marxism following the only path available after the failure of the NEP and war with Poland. Stalin's modernist policy focused on industrial development, worker heroism (the joy of sacrifice in building a socialist system should be reward enough for any good comrade), nationalism, and party guided self-criticism (which I only read as a euphemism for purges and rigid ideological purity). If Stalinism stood in disrepute in 1941 as a result of the purges and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Soviet victory over fascism in World War II revived communism's appeal. Priestland discounts the Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe in the immediate postwar and feels George Kennan overstated the case of Stalin's imperial designs. Instead, according to Priestland, Stalin adhered to the Yalta conference by not supplying Greek insurgents and working through the Popular Front. It was the Marshall Plan in 1947 that led Stalin to alter his original assessment of the postwar world and seek to create puppet regimes. "High Stalinism," as Priestland calls it, did not survive its namesake following the Man of Steel's death in 1953, except in few border nations, like East Germany and North Korea. Nikita Khrushchev returned to the romantic variant of communism. While Mao Zedong experimented with both the romantic and modernist persuasions. By the time Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev communism had been played out. All its variants had been tested. It might have appeared vigorous as it spread in the post-colonial world, but intellectually it was moribund. Brezhnev made one final tweak. In focusing on consumer goods and quality of life, he changed the trajectory of revolution. Instead of some mythical Marxist communist state, the party sought a stable state that ensured economic justice, welfare, and fairness. That it could not live up to these seemingly more modest goals, helps to explain its fall in 1989. This dovetailed nicely with Hayek. Planners cannot plan something as whimsical as personal consumption tastes and fairness and justice are too much in the eye of the beholder to be managed by a centralized government. In the end Priestland argues there are two important lessons. Both of which demonstrate this was not a work trumpeting the triumph of free enterprise in the Cold War! First, pursuit of utopian visions can have disastrous results. I have to say that I do not feel Priestland came fully to terms with the enormity of this disaster in the terms of life lost or the impact on individuals. Comrades Stalin and Mao receive little approbation for the millions who died in pursuit of their policies. While he uses (very well I might add) films and novels as parables for their time, Priestland does not rely on individual human voices. While this is an intellectual history, one still feels a need to paraphrase Carlyle, "if you purge them, do they not bleed?" Second, utopian visions appeal to those who suffer from gross inequality, and this should be addressed. Fair enough, but but this call can be interpreted from so many different perspectives that both President Obama and Governor Romney could use it in their presidential campaigns. I hope this does not appear as a negative review. Priestland took an ambitious topic and created a lively, readable, and informative account that still seemed short at nearly 600 pages! I learned a great deal and will see how it interacts with books I read in the future.

From my blog: http://gregshistoryblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/red-flag.html ( )