The Rise and Fall of Communism
by Archie Brown

When the Soviet Union unraveled, so did the last vestiges of the notion that Communism was a viable means of organizing society. It did not deliver, to say the least....]]> The Rise and Fall of Communism

by Archie Brown

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

When the Soviet Union unraveled, so did the last vestiges of the notion that Communism was a viable means of organizing society. It did not deliver, to say the least, on its promise of justice and equality in contrast to the suffering that capitalism supposedly caused. As Archie Brown puts it in The Rise and Fall of Communism, the whole enterprise had been “a ghastly failure.”

And yet by the late 1970s there were still, by Brown’s count, sixteen countries living under Communist rule, mostly within the orbit of the USSR. The prevalence and durability of an unpopular and ineffective form of government begs the questions that this formidable book addresses: how did Communists manage to take power, how did they hold on to it, and why did they eventually lose it?

Brown, Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, documents a similar story in country after country. Communists came to power and governed by force and coercion because, almost without exception, people did not submit to nor live under Communist rule voluntarily. Reordering society required controlling political behavior and restricting information, which “led logically to physical repression and party dictatorship.” The survival of the dictatorship — that is, of the Communist Party — depended on the top leadership’s use of the coercive apparatus. In Brown’s estimation, Mikhail Gorbachev’s unwillingness to employ it explains Communism’s fall.

It may surprise some American readers to see Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan relegated to relatively minor roles. While Rise and Fall does underestimate the importance of Reagan’s confrontational rhetoric and supportive outreach, it nonetheless makes a compelling argument for the unique significance of Gorbachev. Brown credits the infamous Secret Speech of 1956 for laying the initial groundwork for Gorbachev’s rise. Khrushchev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes “pricked the bubble of infallibility with which the Communist Party had surrounded itself.” Because it shattered remaining illusions in the West about the nature of Communism, the speech was the beginning of the end.

The Prague Spring of 1968, which Brown calls a “delayed reaction” to Khrushchev’s speech, was a harbinger of that end. The freedom briefly enjoyed then was “the culmination of a reform movement inside the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.” It could be turned back only by Soviet military intervention. Though not realized at the time, Brown makes the crucial point that if a similar reform movement had ever gained strength within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there would have been no outside force to stop it.

By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the economic, political and social sclerosis of the USSR was overwhelming. There was little freedom of movement, opportunity, or speech. Living standards were demonstrably lagging those in Western Europe and the United States. Gorbachev’s intention, as Brown emphasizes, was “reform of the system, not transformative change.” He initially operated under the assumption that some political liberalization and the decentralization of economic decision making would save and rehabilitate Communism. More freedom, in his words, would “open up space for the mightiest creative force of socialism.”

Instead, however, momentum built as political freedom led to pluralism and fissures appeared in the Party. By 1989 the ability of the Party to monopolize political debate and the flow of information was severely weakened. Without centralized power, the “leading role” of the Communist Party was moot, and the Soviet Union, essentially, was no longer Communist-ruled. As a result of the end of the monopoly, non-Communist reformist parties were able to come to power in the satellite states — and unlike in decades past were not turned back by the military. The increase in political freedom, combined with Gorbachev’s unwillingness to use force to preserve the Union, meant that its breakup could not be prevented.

As Brown neatly puts it, though it was thought that “the Communist system could not survive without being reformed,” it turned out that it “could not survive with radical reform.” Dissidents, human rights advocates, President Reagan and the Pope knew the reality of Communism all too well. Rise and Fall is ultimately the story of Communists learning it themselves.

Excerpt: “Foreign travel did not automatically broaden the minds of Soviet officials. Few were as well traveled as Andrey Gromyko but he remained set in his ways. Many Soviet politicians and bureaucrats found rationalizations for the extent to which the USSR lagged far behind its Western rivals. Others, for the sake of their careers, engaged in prolonged self-censorship. But the more East-West travel was allowed to take place, the greater was the erosion of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Ideas of liberty and democracy were under no such threat. Western countries had, or should have had, no reason for concern about an increase in the modest numbers of people allowed to travel to their countries from the Soviet and East European states.”

Further Reading: Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective and The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (Americans and the California Dream)
by Kevin Starr

California in the 1950s is collectively remembered as a collage of tailfins, swimming pools, and modernist architecture, a time when any hardworking sap could own a single-family home in the suburbs....]]> Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (Americans and the California Dream)

by Kevin Starr

—Reviewed by Byron Perry

California in the 1950s is collectively remembered as a collage of tailfins, swimming pools, and modernist architecture, a time when any hardworking sap could own a single-family home in the suburbs, complete with good schools and a mall to drive to on Saturdays.

USC historian and former California state librarian Kevin Starr assiduously delves into this gilded age, which he extends to John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, in Golden Dreams, the eighth and final book in his Americans and the California Dream series. In previous volumes, Starr explored growth periods like the Gold Rush and the dot-com bubble before it burst, but no era has had more of an impact on California than the ’50s. The Golden State underwent the biggest boom of rising prosperity in American history — perhaps in all modern history — during the decade, transforming from an agricultural and provincial Western state to one of the biggest and most important economies in the world.

San Fernando Valley developed, mazes of freeways appeared across the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the Giants and Dodgers moved to the West Coast, and California voters approved “the most ambitious water storage and distribution system in the history of the human race.” These are just some of the game-changing events that Starr tackles in Golden Dreams, with a dense and fact-crammed style.

Starr likes to examine history through the movers and shakers. In a chapter on Los Angeles, the historian deftly intertwines the stories of how four people — Archbishop James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, baseball entrepreneur Walter O’Malley, and philanthropist Dorothy Chandler — transformed Los Angeles from regional hub to “supercity.” With disparate visions of modernity, but similar titanic forces of will, these four leaders permanently altered culture and society in their city. McIntyre revamped and expanded the Catholic church; Parker modernized the spectacularly corrupt LAPD (though racism remained rampant); O’Malley brought the Dodgers to L.A. and built them a stadium; and Chandler was responsible for the funding and creation of the world-class Music Center on Bunker Hill.

Starr humanizes history by looking at events this way. We learn, for example, that Parker was an incredibly cranky guy with a booze problem, and that Chandler married into that powerful clan with a chip on her shoulder for being a middle-class girl from Long Beach. But besides these little interesting details, Starr expounds on the real and lasting effects these people had on Los Angeles. Parker militarized the police force and revamped the academy. And Chandler’s fundraising efforts for the Music Center forever changed the dynamic between Hancock Park WASPs and Westside Jews, easing tensions between the two communities.

Starr tends to glorify the ’50s in Dreams, but he does sometimes make insightful points about those who were left behind during California’s furious growth. Writing about the San Fernando Valley’s boom, he points out the hypocrisy of the Los Angeles power structure — including the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Los Angeles Times — that denounced subsidized public housing as communist while praising state and federal programs that facilitated and financed single-family home ownership. “Thus the poor, the majority of them disadvantaged minorities,” he explains, “were being excluded from the same government assistance that was bringing millions of middle-class Americans, veterans especially, into home ownership.”

In light of California’s latest fiscal woes, Golden Dreams seems especially timely and pertinent. Reading about how rapidly the state expanded into the modern “global commonwealth” it is today, it’s hard not to wonder what steps could have been taken then to avoid the quandary we’re in now. It’s a “what if” that Starr chooses not to ponder; he withholds much judgment in Dreams, choosing instead to lay down the facts, and lots of them. Golden Dreams, and the whole Americans and the California Dream series, is about as complete a social, political, and cultural history as a state could ask for.

Excerpt: “As Election Day, 8 November 1960, approached, first-term governor Pat Brown was busy persuading the voters of California to pass Proposition 1, authorizing a $1.75 billion bond issue for the construction of a seven-hundred-mile State Water Project — dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, tunnels, hydroelectrical and pumping stations —to be built across the next two decades. All things considered, Proposition 1 was asking for the most ambitious water storage and distribution system in the history of the human race, and as such it was a tough sell, even for such a masterful salesman as Brown. The magnitude of the project, moving the waters of the north southward into Southern California, clashed headlong with the sectional feeling that continued to characterize the state. Nowhere, for example, was opposition to Proposition 1 stronger than in Brown’s hometown of San Francisco, where the Chronicle lambasted the proposal almost daily as a water-grab by the Southland, depicting Brown in one cartoon as a bespectacled octopus asking a voter to sign a blank check. Given the high self-regard of the Bay Area, and the water-sufficient success of the Hetch Hetchy and East Bay Utility systems, the opposition of the Chronicle made a certain sense, as did the wholesale endorsement of the measure by the Los Angeles Times, whose readers desperately needed water.”

Further Reading: Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Americans & the California Dream) and Los Angeles: Biography of a City

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
by Charles P. Pierce

When fringe opinions are louder than reasonable ones, and seem ready to overwhelm Americans' ability to understand what's happening in the world, consider it a cost of free speech.

Charles Pierce makes precisely this case....]]> Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
by Charles P. Pierce

—Reviewed by Monica Barra

When fringe opinions are louder than reasonable ones, and seem ready to overwhelm Americans’ ability to understand what’s happening in the world, consider it a cost of free speech.

Charles Pierce makes precisely this case in his Idiot America, exploring with a keen eye and sense of humor how to understand and cope with the effect extremism has on society. Pierce offers a part historical, part elaborately critical take on idiocy in America. Tracing the history of stupidity back to its roots, Pierce’s book is a concerned, wry, and at times biting foray into the people — whom he calls “cranks” — in American history who have led to our contemporary state of ignorance.

Pierce credits the oft-overlooked Founding Father, James Madison, otherwise known as the “diminutive hypochondriac from Virginia,” with recognizing that liberty could have negative consequences. The founders unleashed upon a fairly trusting and compliant public the freedom to express new ideas, whether good or bad. Americans were the perfect audience for the crank. Cranks, as Pierce describes them, reside on the outskirts of the population, and care quite a lot more about having their voices heard and gaining popularity than educating the public. But they have shaped the country’s history, pursuing their role, to work in the “realm of the national imagination… to wander out of its borders and map its frontiers.” Whether or not they brought about good with their explorations, however, is still debatable.

The founding prince of cranks, Pierce says, was one Ignatius Donnelly. Beginning in the early 1800s, Donnelly invested his time in numerous, mostly failed, endeavors: real estate speculation in Minnesota; a political career during which he periodically changed parties to whatever benefitted him the most; and historical studies, his greatest triumph, culminating in a quasi-historical book on the lost city of Atlantis. His repeated failure to gain respect and success from his work only fueled his belief that “he was a genius for whom the world was not yet ready.” If one idea failed, he would try another. He was constantly at odds with a fickle public that wavered between admiration and criticism of his works.

But cranks haven’t been the same since Donnelly, Pierce notes. Cranks of that era might have raged against their dismissive audiences, but they were ultimately content to retreat to the periphery and conjure new schemes. The cranks imagined that while everyone was crazy and unstable, they resided on intellectually higher ground. Today, Pierce shows that cranks have a more intimate and playful relationship with the public. Using media and mass communication, and thanks to easy and cheap access to the web, cranks now have almost limitless freedom to infiltrate the public imagination. Feigning expertise, Pierce notes, has become easier and more marketable.

With relatively unchecked access to the public, cranks have paved the way for stupidity to flourish in America. Giving an ear to individuals and groups on the fringe, Pierce argues, has little by little taken us away from rational and sound thinking, with a real impact on the way the country works. Pierce considers the fallout from a lone man’s attack on the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. After deciding on a design, following months of public meetings and a far-ranging competition, one blogger claimed that the memorial had been deliberately designed in the shape of a crescent, pointing towards Mecca, and counted the terrorists among those memorialized in the design. With a hat-tip to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, he mounted a campaign attacking the memorial’s architects, claiming that they had built a memorial to Islam and not the flight victims. Public outcry eventually forced the architect to straighten out the crescent into a semicircle, appeasing the vocal minority.

Pierce unleashes story after story to drive home his conviction that Americans, swayed by various fringe groups and individuals, have dug themselves too deep into idiocy to find a way out. Even the 2008 election, which saw both candidates, and, Pierce argues, particularly Barack Obama, distancing themselves from and criticizing cranks, didn’t lead to a moment of clarity: “Obama’s rise to the Democratic nomination on a nebulous concept of ‘change’ seemed to be based, at least in part, on the idea that we would all stop conning ourselves. But no.”

Pierce’s book is, as he puts it, a tirade, the result of spending years as a journalist watching, he says, intelligence unravel in the United States. As Pierce observes, “the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida.” It’s the American way.

Excerpt: Human beings are storytelling creatures. We structure reality in terms of narratives. In other words, we start at Point A and get to Point B, and everything in between is called hope. If you’re a human, you’re a storyteller, a story believer, and that’s just the way it is.

Further Reading: The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion and The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

David Gardner, Chief Leader Writer and Associate Editor at the Financial Times, asks in his book, Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, why the Arab world has not experienced the same surge of democratization as other regions in the last century. He chatted with Zócalo about the "Arab exception" and the role of the West in perpetuating it....]]>

David Gardner, Chief Leader Writer and Associate Editor at the Financial Times, asks in his book, Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, why the Arab world has not experienced the same surge of democratization as other regions in the last century. He chatted with Zócalo about the “Arab exception” and the role of the West in perpetuating it.

Q. What led you to write this book, and briefly, what argument do you make?

A. What led me to write it really is that we have a region mired in despotism and tyranny and different forms of autocracy, and the U.S. and the Western countries pretty much without exception have for a very long period — throughout most of the last century and continuing into this one — propped up a network of regional strongmen in the interest of short-term stability. This has unleashed a blind rage within the broader Middle East and across the Muslim world against the West. That really really does need to change.

This collusion and local autocracy has created what is in effect an ‘Arab exception,’ which has left the Arabs marooned as waves of democracy have broken over practically everywhere else in the world — Eastern Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia. I think pretty much in no other part of the world — not even China —  has the West operated with so little regard for the human and political rights of local citizens.

There is an analogy that I draw. The West has an almost morbid fear of political Islam, which is obviously fed and exaggerated by its local client rulers, and has served to deny Arabs democracy in case they support Islamist parties, just as during the Cold War, Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans had to endure Western-endorsed dictatorship in case they supported Communism. And whereas now you won’t find anybody who springs to the defense of the Pinochets and the Mubutus and so on, you will find people who spring to the defense of the Mubaraks, the King Abdullahs, and so on. [Westerners] frequently don’t, at least in policy terms, draw any conclusions from this or learn any lessons. That in essence is what the book is about.

Q. Aren’t there dangers in supporting democracy, particularly if Islamic parties win, in the short-run?

A. Oh yes. Anybody who says support for democracy is going to automatically translate into stability is probably kidding themselves. It won’t really do that. Nor will it necessarily look very Jeffersonian. It could open a period of what to us will look like fairly illiberal politics. But one needs to measure that against the alternative. Our collusion in tyranny as the ostensibly lesser evil to political Islam has created a situation of pretty much blanket hostility of Arabs and Muslims against the West. The danger is that we are driving them into the arms of the jihadists, who, as you know, are aided by the backlash against U.S. policy in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and are trying to enter the Muslim mainstream, which is not a complete dream. Their situation at the moment is that there are millions or tens of millions of Islamists, and thousands or tens of thousands of jihadists. We need to make sure the Islamists — who come in different varieties, fortunately — have the opportunity to express themselves democratically and adhere to democratic norms, because they’re there, and we can’t really shut them out. We’ve almost engineered or helped engineer a situation in which they are the center of political gravity. If we support dictatorships that have swept almost the entire political spectrum of any form of dissent, and leave their people no refuge, no rallying point, no ability to regroup except in the mosque and the madrassa, the Islamic schools, we have pretty much guaranteed that the future form of politics in these countries will be heavily influenced by Islamism.

The second comparison I would make is experience in our own countries. We should be able to see the similarities between Islamism and 19th century nationalism in Europe. Both started as a forced march into the future but then detoured in sinister and destructive ways — in Europe, obviously, fascism, and now in the Islamic context, this jihadist cult of death. Any sane policy would be devoted to avoiding the lethal form of radical Islam. The way to do that is in no small part to find a space for thoughtful Islamism to emerge. You do find this, it exists. The best example so far, which is not in the Arab world but mesmerizes political thinkers in the Arab world is Turkey, where you have a ruling party, the Justice and Development or so-called AKP party led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was put together from the wreckage of two failed Islamist parties. You might call it neo-Islamist or evolved Islamist, and it has taken in a large part of the traditional small- to medium-sized business classes of Anatolia, the land mass of Turkey. These are people who are conservatives, they are observant, often pious Muslims, but they’re very dynamic at the same time. They want a modern party, a bit like the evolution in Europe and particularly in Latin America of Christian democracy. This is a Muslim democracy. I’m not saying by any means that that can translate as a model. But what I am saying is that it is a success, and for that reason is very attractive to people in countries that are still mired in tyranny — because success sells.

Q. How do two countries on the periphery of the Arab world — Iran and Pakistan — relate to the Arab world and impact U.S. policy there?

A. Pakistan is an example of how to get it almost precisely wrong, so far as Western policy is concerned. Yet again we put all our money on a local strongman — and I do mean literally money, $12 billion, on General Musharraf, conceiving him to be part of the solution when he’s clearly part of the problem. We ignored the mainstream political parties and stood by as he marginalized them and gave much much greater space to radical Islamist parties. He would find his allies anywhere he could — and was obviously the head of an army which had relationships with jihadi groups — for pursuing his policy in Kashmir and keeping the door in Afghanistan closed, so India couldn’t have a dagger at their backs, so to speak. This went on with the justification that he was an absolutely vital ally in the War on Terror, but actually, during his period in office, the jihadi phenomenon grew exponentially with results we can now see, calling into question the survival of the Pakistani state. We’ve repeated in spades all the mistakes that have been made in the Arab world, except that the Arab state systems are probably slightly more resilient than Pakistan’s, which is a loose multiethnic federation. These are really serious policy errors.

In Iran, the story is different. There, what we have to recognize is missed opportunities, of which there are two, principally. One, in 1997 to 1998, when you had a reformist government under President Khatami coming to power in what was more than a landslide, an avalanche of votes and determined to place the country on a firmer constitutional basis under the rule of law, with primacy to citizens’ rights. There was an attempt under the Clinton administration to reach some sort of rapprochement with Iran.

Again, in May 2003, the Iranians, with the imprimatur of the Supreme Leader Khamenei,  actually offered a detailed grand bargain with the U.S. to settle all outstanding differences, ranging from Iranian support for insurgent organizations to the nuclear dossier and so on. This was simply rejected, it wasn’t even looked at. This document exists, we know, it’s been published. It was passed to Washington through the Swiss Foreign Ministry, which acts for U.S. interests Iran. I think the Obama administration recognizes that and is still — despite the difficulties at the present, this sort of electoral coup that’s taken place in Iran — is determined eventually to explore the possibility of engaging and reaching agreement on these sorts of issues.

Having said all that, I’m quite encouraged by the Obama speech in Cairo, which addressed a whole number of issues. The main focus tended to be on what he had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in that speech also I think was a fairly determined assertion of universal values, including democracy, and he said it in Cairo. Now we’ll see what it is he actually does. People remember Condoleezza Rice gave a resounding speech in Cairo in favor of democracy in I believe June 2005 in which she said the U.S. has pursued stability at the expense of democracy and has ended up with neither. She went on to say we’ve learnt our lesson and will align with everyone who stands up for freedom, prosperity and security, and against tyranny, which breeds despair, humiliation, and terror.

Bush himself a few years earlier in 2003 had also made similar sorts of remarks, and in particular dismissed what he called the culture of condescension that suggests Arabs and Muslims were unsuited to democracy. But you know — other than their taking a sledgehammer to Iraq, which was the weakest link in the chain of the Arab world — not much happened at all. The countries the Bush administration targeted for redemption, as it were, they had almost zero knowledge of them or how to go about it. Secretary Rice for example brought to this job a sort of Cold Warrior mindset in which it seems to me she was reading over the idea of the Soviet buffer state into a wholly different environment in which we the West had been backing, as it were, the local variant of Stalinism. Then you have the neoconservative gaggle that provided the philosophy, who seemed to think the Middle East was sort of a ten-pin bowling alley — you hit the front pin hard enough, Iraq, and the rest would simply skittle over. What I think really brought the so-called freedom agenda to a jutting halt was the electoral success of Islamism: partially in Egypt; in Iraq, where they won two-thirds of the seats in parliament; in Palestine, where Hamas trashed Fatah; and in Lebanon, with Hezbollah. As I was saying, we pretty much guaranteed that outcome after a century of collusion with local despots who in effect suppressed all challenge, leaving their citizens nowhere else to go. In reality the option we have is to learn to manage the consequences, to learn how to live with Islamists.

Q. How does the Arab world feel about the U.S.’s shifting its emphasis in the war on terror from Iraq to Afghanistan?

A. Uncomfortable. What I would say is this: I think there was a general understanding after 9/11 that it was inevitable, and that there was a justice in attacking the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Where that all became muddied was when they swiveled around their fight and went after Iraq. The perception then became, what the U.S. and its allies, such as the Blair government, had embarked on was a war against Islam. It’s quite different to row back from that. Although, I think people do see that there is, I would have thought, pretty close to, if not quite zero, but very little sympathy for the activity of, say, the Pakistani Taliban, and the savagery with which they impose their government and their form of justice on Muslims. Who is it that they kill? They kill 90% Muslims. There is, I’m afraid because Iraq so muddied the waters, a great deal of suspicion. I think there’s even a wider suspicion, even among people who can see the logic of what’s going on, as to what the stamina of the U.S. and NATO is in Afghanistan, how long are they going to stick around and indeed how competent are they to try and impose some sort of order on a country like Afghanistan. At a time when that conflict has spread into the broader region, not just into Pakistan but — as we saw last November with the attack on Mumbai — into the Indian subcontinent as a whole. For example, therefore, many Muslims would say, so does this mean as part of the attempt to settle this entire problem they’re going to address the issue of Kashmir, which is diplomatically incredibly sensitive, certainly to the Indians? It’s a mixed and ambivalent reaction really.

*Photo of Istanbul courtesy of Oberazzi.