Communism: the rise and fall of a ‘virus’

Historians now have important new sources of information available to them about the former communist world. They also enjoy the advantage of hindsight. Unfortunately, Robert Service's Comrades - Communism: A World History (Pan Macmillan, £25) tends to reiterate arguments that were already worn before the end of the Cold War.

Although the author argues that the theory of totalitarianism needs to 'undergo further revision', the book revisits the old arguments. It seems that Marx and Engels were responsible for producing ideas that would beget the totalitarian monster of Stalinist Russia. According to this fatalistic perspective, totalitarianism acquired a dynamic of its own to haunt large chunks of the globe: 'Yet ideologies and politics can mutate and spread like a virus which counteracts every medical effort to pinpoint and eradicate it'.

Transporting communism into nature takes it out of history. Yet it is important to recall that communism succeeded in inspiring millions because it appeared to offer hope and

because its main competitor, capitalism, did not. The growth of the communist world was intimately linked to the fragility and disorientation of capitalist society. As Service makes clear, it was not until the 1950s that communism was forced on the defensive and began to lose its appeal in the West. As late as the early 1980s, leading Western strategists assumed that the Soviet Union was a fact of life. It collapsed not because it was defeated but because its leading adherents and beneficiaries lost faith in their own system.

Paradoxically, the beneficiaries of the collapse of communism may not be its capitalist competitors. Detente came to an end in December 1979, when Russian troops invaded Afghanistan and, in response to this event, the Americans began to organise Muslim insurgents to fight Moscow. The Soviet empire never recovered from its subsequent defeat. It may well be that the price that the West will pay for the defeat of world communism is far higher than it suspects. Though the return of this 'virus' is unlikely.